Solomon on the Potomac
by D.T. Harris

I have also reserved the option of trial by military commission for foreign terrorists who wage war against our country. Non-citizens, non-US citizens who plan and/or commit mass murder are more than criminal suspects. They are unlawful combatants who seek to destroy our country and our way of life.
— President Bush, speaking before the US Attorneys Conference in Washington, 11/29/2001

It was a close election — remember? A half-million votes nationwide went the other way. A five-member majority of the US Supreme Court stepped into the new role of political appointee. And the count and recount totals in Florida ended with a 537-vote margin going to the side that said "the more lipstick and mascara on a Secretary of State, the better."

No one said that political "hardball" — thumping democracy until it produces the outcome you want — would be easy. The Republican thumping here, in Florida's Chadlands, has been a big thump-down since the Roaring '80s. Maybe it was the resurrection of the G.I. Joe, boy-toy image that turned the rainbow khaki. Or when Old Ranger Gipper Guy — the human pitch pipe that set the tone for the Great American Conservative Enlightenment — turned up the White House thermostat, his first official act. Or when George Herbert Walker Bush made the world the kinder, gentler, safer place we know today.

And as "now" continues rolling back toward "then," the current successor in the line of Roaring '80s leader guys has signed a Presidential Military Order to try foreign terrorists before military tribunals. This order gives the president, and his secretary of defense, wide and yet-to-be-defined authority to establish procedures to detain suspects for an unlimited length of time before trial, and it sets up new procedures for trying them before military tribunals that are independent of, and do not follow, the established rules of evidence and criminal procedure of either the U.S. federal court system or the system of US military courts martial.

At the same time, the president has been more than a little trigger happy in deploying executive privilege as of late, barring Congress from accessing Department of Justice files. Combined, Bush seems to be setting himself up as a "Solomon on the Potomac," the be-all-and-end-all arbiter of criminal justice.

Why should this alarm the 60 percent of you who recent polls say are not alarmed? You aren't that murdering, scumbag terrorist found cooking up some toxins in his crock pot, are you? You aren't the guy without a current green card, hoping to go unnoticed as he scrubs the office urinals, or the woman down the hall who, after grad school, got a VISA to stay on and find a cure for cancer. Your family has been in this country, now, for what — a few generations, at least?

Why is it un-American to dispense un-American justice to non-Americans, just because they happen to be in America? So what if "individual[s] subject to this order" have no rights beyond those described in the order now, or as amended in the future? If they have no rights to discover what evidence or information the prosecution may be withholding, no rights to a jury of their peers or to a public trial? So what if, when convicted by only two-thirds of a panel that is not compelled to find guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt," they can only appeal the conviction — or the sentence — by petitioning the person who made the initial determination to have them tried?

This might sound like something straight from "The Trial," but it's not. It's straight from the White House. And it isn't close to being "frontier justice." So why should Joe and Jane America, proud non-foreign nationals, worry?

Well, one self-centrist reason might be that if future investigations or future "acts of terrorism" — in a "war" that could drag on until the Pentagon grows another side — involve American citizens, then why wouldn't they be tried with the other "murderous suspects"? It would be a small step, in a long song and dance, for a subsequent presidential order to change "any individual who is not a United States citizen" to "any individual." Then Americans who tried to helpfully point out political stupidity, could be threatened with the stick of "[actions that] aided and abetted, or ... that have caused, threaten to cause, or have as their aim to cause, injury to or adverse effects on the United States, its citizens, national security, foreign policy, or economy...." Is this so unreasonable, coming from an administration composed of retread souls who thought the only reason we "lost" the "war" in Vietnam was that dissent destroyed the country's will to persevere — and that this was, somehow, not a fortunate thing?

A second, small reason for worry might be the person who determines who gets tried, and then, possibly later, after conviction, decides whose appeal he will consider. This is truly a role written for a Solomon. So, is someone who managed to get through Yale and Harvard Business School and still retain the innocent, verbal skills of a fourth-grader really the best choice to play "Solomon on the Potomac"?

A third worry bead to add to this string might be the question: "Why is this happening in the first place?" The first World Trade Center bombing trial, and the trials for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, were concluded with convictions and no reports that evidence became public that could damage intelligence operations. So why is the Administration reserving the right to use the kind of summary, frontier justice this country has repeatedly condemned elsewhere, when there is no need for it?

Okay, we made some foreign-policy mistakes in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s — that high-stakes domino game in Southeast Asia, the near-disaster of listening to some peanut farmer try to sell us on conserving energy. But that's all behind us. Now when we're hated in the world it's solely for our demonic obsessions with freedom, hair gel and toaster ovens, right? So what gives?

Well, like some Neanderthalian link to a swamp-cloud past, it could be those dainty, way-ripe "shooggies," hangin' three hands down below that butt crack of a platitude "limiting the role of the federal government." In loose translation, this would refer to the still-lingering triumph of the "Southern Strategy," circa 1980, the appeal to the nation's lowest common denominator still playing in home entertainment centers across the country and its robust disregard, not for all authorities "federal," but just the ones that tell you it takes a dog to beat a dog.

Or it could be just that the president feels, if you're confident your faith in God has given you the certainty of knowing right from wrong, all you really need to do is "look into someone's soul" to see the guilt, as he claims to be capable of. It's pretty simple. And cost-effective. Aren't we lucky to be living in such Solomonistic times — even if it is a tongue-twister?

E-mail D.T. Harris at calamostreet at aol dot com.