Sounds like a win-win to me.

Also, yesterday my partner apparently spent some time with Thomas Jefferson’s wikipedia page, learning about his rape affair with a slave child (she was 14!). In bed, at 4 AM, he’s about to go to sleep while I have to finish up a book about Nazis and biopower, and he brings this up. I couldn’t stop myself, soon I was on a roll about why America as a country is totally illegitimate and how anyone who talks about the constitution as if it is anything but some laws written by rapists is willfully ignoring reality. We don’t let criminals write the laws! That would be crazy talk! Why should we follow the laws that a bunch of rapist person-owning assholes wrote! And the whole “time and the place, kids” thing just makes me angry, because the man took Sally Hemmings to France, where she wasn’t his slave! In France they didn’t have slaves! And yet!

Oh god. I seriously hate America, ya’ll.

But if these people spent years and years getting tortured and held without trial, isn’t everything the US could possibly have on them going to be inadmissible, either because it was gathered under torture or because they were arrested and not charged and it’s not like any soldiers in Afghanistan were getting warrants from judges before breaking into houses to try to find evidence.

I find the whole thing to be somewhat of a logical vortex. Let’s say a kid throws a grenade at US soldiers in Afghanistan. Is that illegal? Can he be tried for trying to kill a bunch of Americans–wait, I mean, they aren’t just Americans, they’re American soldiers. So if this kid throws a grenade in a country that isn’t the US, where they may not have laws against throwing grenades at invading troops, how can he have broken a law? And even if it is illegal to throw grenades in Afghanistan, why would he be tried in the US for a crime that took place in an entirely other country? And if it’s illegal for the kid to throw grenades at US soldiers, it would be important to know why it’s illegal to throw grenades at US soldiers. Is it illegal because murder is illegal? If that’s the case, then surely all the US soldiers that ever killed anyone in Afghanistan have to be similarly tried for murder, right?

That’s why a not-American, or an International, court would be preferable to an American one. Because if the kid didn’t break any laws in the US then he can’t be tried here, but presumably the US considers trying to kill its soldiers a crime in general, or against the world or the moral order or the universe or something. So who is the victim–against whom did this kid commit a crime? The soldiers? The United States? If it’s the soldiers, then presumably they’d have to be tried for anyone they killed in Afghanistan, because then this situation is framed as individuals against individuals. But if it’s the US in general, then certainly the victim of the crime cannot also be expected to be the judge of the trial. Right?

And this is why I am studying Shakespeare instead of law. I can’t read this stuff without wanting to fling monkey poop at the constitution and the whole conception of the legal system as it exists today. It makes me so sad and angry and frustrated that I just end up sobbing or going “la la la time to read some young adult fantasy novels la la la!”

I’d love to see the IC put Bush & Co. on trial, but that’s a separate proceeding from this guy’s individual situation. I haven’t heard an outcry from other countries which have been victimized by Quaeda terrorism to have an international trial, although I agree that it’s worth doing.

Besides, Giuliani is against this trial, which can only mean it’s a good thing.