3 in 30 - 2001.11.25 Sunday
The Daily Yomiuri—which arrives on our doorstep in our neighborhood at about three in the morning—carried this article on November 23 as part of its continuing coverage of the US war. It was printed without comment.
Yet, these statements by a high-level US Cabinet official cannot go unchallenged.
Last week we watched a couple of episodes of the old television program The Lone Ranger. (The Rangers were government agents assigned to bring a formal law and order to the degenerate western wilderness of the Texas territory.) Each episode was a 23 minute morality play teaching why the US government laws were designed as they were.
One episode swept through several issues confronting US citizens and our government in the past few months. 1) Monopolies can and do abuse their power. 2) Competition is necessary for keeping monopolies in check. 3) Vigilantism is not a function of a legal government.
Rumsfeld is condoning exactly that kind of western frontier lynch mob for bin Laden. I too, would like to see the individuals and groups responsible for the attacks on the US brought to justice but—unlike Rumsfeld—I expect from my government a legal justice, a public trial, with facts brought forward.
Has our world changed so much that we as a nation have lost our vision of the tenets which made our country morally great? Rumsfeld has not simply violated "political correctness" (to use the watered down cliche), but the very foundations upon which our country was apparently founded. If we as a country ignore what was laid down in the Bill of Rights, then we deny the heart of American ideals of the rule of law.
In the Lone Ranger episode, it was discovered that the ringleader of the lynch mob was the one who initially violated the law, not the individual being hunted down. I can't help but wonder what information about the Al-Qaida organization, structure, and support might come out in a public trial. Various heads of state seem to been apprised of the connections, but the public has not seen facts that would survive the scrutiny of a court of law. I'm not so sure about Rumsfeld's goodness, or his state of grace.