Notes from the Milosevic Trial - Day 1,741

You really do have a hunter’s eye, Big A. Very sweet. Right on the money.

My resounding image of the Butt-fucker of the Balkans is the external shot of his cell door. Kinda like a dormitory you’d see in a beureaucratic version of Dante’s Inferno. Maybe that’s what drove his wife and sprog to immediately scream “He was poisoned!” (in Serbian, of course). Yeah, right, the man with 212/186 blood pressure was poisoned. Like a pin poisons an overinflated balloon.

I still can’t spell bereaucr beureau bureay that fucking word. Without looking it up.

Pete, always a pleasure to have your input. You’ve been scarce lately, Bubba. The KGB used to have prisoners in their custody to succumb to what was alleged to be a 9 mm heart attack - the most common cause of death in the old days. Perhaps that’s what did in the old goat.

Adam, a suitably eurocentric report of the proceedings, however you did not stipulate under the Miscellaneous, part (b) the number of Pan Europeans it will require to change each light bulb and what their unemployment and retirement compensations will be in perpetuity - glaring error that can yet be rectified under the 2 hour rule.

Good thing the acronyms are in there to save space.

Off target, but strangly interesting is the arrest of Claude Allen, former White House advisor. http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/11/claude.allen.arrest/index.html This is very unusual and self defeating behavior. What would cause someone making $161,000/year to do something so off the wall as scamming items worth as little as $2.50. This is not mid-life crisis; this may be mental illness. An earlier example is may cinch this prognosis - he’s a black man who went to work for Jesse Helms. Proir intervention by family or friends could have saved this man’s career! Now he’s just another black man bound for prison. As Dan Quayle would say,”It’s terrible to lose your mind or… lose your mind and it’s terri…no, A mind is a terrible thing to lose. That’s it!”

I think, if anything, what this trial highlighted was the difficulty of making these international war crime trials work. Whats more, making them work at the highest level.

coop, there was a wonderful Hunter Thompson story, I forget the book and the point, but the story was basically that of a hillbilly who somehow struck it rich selling cars in LA. After years and being a wealthy, respected car dealer he just went nuts one night. In Thompson’s view, reverting back to his roots. The story goes that guy stole a hopped T-bucket from his own garage. Found some moonshine and went drag racing on the coast in the middle of the night.

Perhaps the Allen story is something like that? I could say that the Allen story is merely a metaphor for an entire party of morally bankrupt sociopaths. But that’s been said before, hasn’t it?

Ice, fortunately the Saddam trial proves that these things can work smoothly.

Sweet. Check out what Josh Marshall has posted on the Allen story…

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007891.php

You just can’t write fiction like this.

As slow and painful as this trial was, this is a hell of a lot better than kangaroo courts, or invading a country because we don’t like their leaders (Panama, Grenada, Iraq, etc.).

Another telling symptom of Claude Allen’s Pathology is that he was a protégé of Clarence Thomas. (Sounds like self loathing to me.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/politics/14allen.html?hp&ex=11423988 00&en=942ca7d29a427eec&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Maybe there will be some heart problems on this side of the pond.

MT: The punch line was that the death wasn’t mentioned till the end of the memo. Welcome to bureaucracies. The U also works at glacial speed. [With global warming, I may need a new metaphor.]

Too bad ol’ Slobo got off so easy - what ever the cause may have been.

WF, “Good”? “Bad”? From a conservative? Mate, it’s much simpler than that! The UN is slow and sad, but never good or bad. Only folks who need to think in terms of absolutes consider such a bureaucratic (I scrolled up, thanks Siobhan!) corporation like the UN in terms of absolutism (even in ironic terms!)

Try substituting the phrase “the rest of the world, specifically not including the US” instead of the acronym “UN”, and your post reads very differently… And before other trolls start arguing that the US is actually part of the UN, please look at the number of instances where the US has abstained, attempted to veto, or misled the UN. Two words - “white powder”. Or just one word - “Whaling”. Another one : “Iran”. So many to choose from, so little space.

Nah, the US treats the UN like a stupid but lovable, if annoying, family uncle - but an uncle who’s got power of attorney. The analogy works in so many ways - why else would the US send someone like “Smokin John” Bolton to a discussion group? It’s like sending Condoleeeezza Rice to sort out the Middle East. Compassionate conservatism at its rawest and sexiest. And yes, those four words should never, ever, appear in the same sentence. (Shiver)

And let’s not even mention the ICC.

HEY! No one’s said anything about today being National Pi Day! You know March 14th - 3/14 - 3.14… - Pi? What’s with you guys anyway? Come on! I had to get up from this really kicking drum circle (Art Blakey, John Bonham and Rick Allen’s left arm, too cool!) to shake you guys awake. Okay, no ice cream for any of you; but now Pie, all you can eat!

Okay back to the circle now; Gene Krupa’s due back around 9:15 and he always has the best dope and, tonight, the best pies, too! Ciao!

Adam, I hadn’t been following the Milosevic trial closely enough to have read the description of his jail. Sigh. At least we know he didn’t die of cold or hunger in his bare, comfortless cell. In fact, I think I once paid good money for a studio apartment in Berkeley that was neither as large nor as well equipped. It certainly didn’t have satellite television, although since this was 1965 I suppose you can’t count that…

Yeah but, hedera, think of the freedom you felt vs what Milosevic was feeling. Does that help any?

Okay, speaking of Gitmo… did anyone hear the interview with Maj. Gen. Jay Hood on All Things Considered tonight? He’s just about to leave there after two years in charge. There was a little line of questioning about “what could you hope to learn from interrogating these guys after they’ve been locked up for four years?” This is how the story continues:

“Hood is both passionate and slightly defensive over the persistent questions about the relevancy of intelligence being gathered. Perhaps that’s why he is allowing a peek at some new evidence in a so-called evidence locker — a long, low building that overlooks the sparkling blue waters of the Caribbean. This is the first time a journalist has been allowed inside. Metal shelves, crammed with dark green boxes fill the cavernous rooms. In them are more than 120,000 documents: telephone records, captured notebooks with all sorts of engineering data in them, both real and forged money, passports.

“General Hood says when the detainees were captured about four years ago, the evidence was gathered up and stuffed into garbage bags and boxes. “It was hastily inventoried, stacked up, sealed and then transported here to Guantanamo,” he says. “Frankly, it’s just in the last year that we’ve been able to take a closer look at what we’ve got here.”

“Hood says what they’re finding is that some of the detainees they thought were low-level players in fact held more important positions in the Taliban and al Qaeda. Hood is unabashedly unapologetic about Guantanamo. He says if he felt detainees had no intelligence value or could all be safely integrated back into their societies, then he would tell his chain of command.”

Okay, so after four years they finally get around to looking at the evidence. Fowler, you’re certainly right about the bureaucracy aspect. If some of these guys “held more important positions”, wouldn’t that have been handy to know back in 2002? These clowns want to use the “ticking time bomb” scenario to justify torture, but they don’t even bother to look into notebooks full of engineering data? And the NPR reporter didn’t even ask a followup question?

My followup question: WTF?

cooper– I called both Liddy and Richard Burr the other day asking them to support Feingold’s censure resolution. Yes of course it was an exercise in futility but I figure they need to know that not all of us in the Tarheel State are marching lockstep behind this administration. Liddy’s aide actually asked for my comments which she would “pass on to the Senator” In both cases I was told that the senators had not made a decision yet and that it would be posted on the website. So I’ve been looking at Liddy’s site and man, what a sorry excuse for a legislator she is. She’s so busy trying to raise money that there isn’t one important piece of legislation with her name on it for the past year or so. But she’s on the record with support for Veterans’ Day and the Boys and Girls Clubs. Fearless in her initiative, she is.

Burr was my Congressman before he became Senator. Not half as offensive as Liddy but another cipher in the Senate. The next time I write either of them I’m going to ask why they are wasting my tax dollars on a legislative branch, since it’s simply rubber stamping executive decisions and not carrying out its Constitutional role to check and balance.

Murray -

Not WTF, but BAU (Business As Usual).

Murray, buddy, pal, perhaps the thoughts of Rick “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter” Santorum redlined your bile meter. I can certainly see that, however “At least in N. Carolina you can expect crappy senators.” Let me hasten to point out that it was not always so. Step into the Wayback Machine and go back to 1974 and one of the stars of the “WahtahGate” Investigation - Senator Sam Ervin, D/NC. Back then Senators - both Republican and Democrat had backbones and walked upright, no knuckle dragging. Oh, those were the days…

Cooper,

You mean SOME senators. As I recall the Carolina’s during the 70s still gave us Jessie and Strom.

The field has widened, now states like Oklahoma, Alaska, and PA vie for the most outrageously stupid, bigoted, and destructive senator.

Thanks for reminding me, I’d forgotten the definition of Santorum.

There’s a new definition for Napoli, too.