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EDITOR'S
NOTE: This is a parody.
Associated
Press
Islamabad, Pakistan
May 1, 2002
stellar American legal team is readying briefs for tomorrow's opening
arguments in the trial of 8,000 purported al Qaeda defendants on
charges of conspiracy to commit bodily harm, in association with
the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings of September 11, 2001.
Change
of Venue?
At
the very outset, noted criminal defense attorney Gerry Spence —
retained by the Saudi Arabian government as an impartial outside
observer — sounded a note of caution about any chance of a
fair hearing in Islamabad. "We must move these trials outta
here yesterday. There's an American air base in Afghanistan now,
and we hear hourly the booms of American planes overhead —
intimidation, anyone? If we can't get to Baghdad or Mecca I'll opt
for Detroit, and pronto. And we'll move to separate all these trials.
After all, there are at least 5,000 courtrooms in Michigan alone.
And I want a full accounting of the conditions of our clients' confinement.
I mean, 8,000 still in makeshift tents and caves? What kind of inhuman
prisons are we talking about? And Lunchables instead of traditional
rice and lamb? Is that cruel and unusual punishment or what?"
Dream
Team II?
Nation
of Islam interests have apparently retained Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.
to coordinate the defense of those accused from the Sudan and Somalia.
"This is a classic rush-to-judgment racial-profiling case,
and it stinks to high heaven. The G-men made a decision months ago
that the "al Qaeda 8K" were guilty, and now they can't
lose face by admitting there is not a shred of evidence. But if
the prints don't stick, you gotta acquit."
Cochran went
on, "And where are the North Africans on the juries? I'd like
to see some brothers too from Ethiopia and Nigeria. Lord, I've got
security people with me right now over here from the D.C. mosques
and the New Black Panthers, and they're all ready to serve. No way
we're going to get a fair trial without Mohammedans of color. This
is the worst transgression of justice since the Holocaust."
Purportedly
struggling with legal problems of his own, celebrated defense counsel
F. Lee Bailey was nevertheless reported to be close to obtaining
a visa, in hopes of flying into Islamabad later this week to direct
the Syrian cross-examination of government witnesses.
"I plan
to get Rumsfeld on the stand," Bailey announced when reached
in Florida by phone. "Oh, yeah, baby, I'll go mano a mano
big time with him — one old soldier to another — to see
if his planes have been killing my clients without a trial."
Bailey gave
some hint of his colorfully combative style: "I want Rummy
to look F. Lee Bailey in the eye, man-to-man, and tell the world
that we were not attacking anyone without a warrant. Let's see if
he has the cojones to go uno con uno with me —
under oath — and spill his guts that he in fact bombed without
a single court order. Without a single one!"
Unidentified
parties in Lebanon have reportedly retained noted appellate expert
Barry Scheck, fresh from his American lecture tour on the sanctity
of DNA evidence in capital punishment cases. Scheck acknowledged,
however, that in this particular instance, the government's acquisition
of DNA evidence from the TT (Twin Towers) was quite unusually and
"hopelessly" contaminated. But even more important, Scheck
asserted, was the critical, yet unanswered, question of "visual
video distortion."
"VVD is
an entirely new field. Only a handful of experts from SA (Scheck
Associates) know that perhaps as many as four or five per every
6 billion video transmissions — even more common an occurrence
in live-video linkages from caves — are simply inaccurate due
to DD (digital disruption). At least four or five — maybe even
as high as six — mind you out of a mere 6 billion! And that's
a conservative figure, with an error rate of less than 1 percent.
The military GQ hasn't got a clue that its entire video evidence
in this trial is VVD unsound. Seismologists of the ASA, geographers
from the AAG, and electrical engineers at UL are all prepared to
testify under oath that there is a distinct mathematical possibility
that Mr. bin Laden's purported videos were garbled in transmission.
In fact, due to VVD and some DD blowback, these VCR reproductions
may well not represent, at least in their present fragmented state,
those words which OBL actually spoke. SA has obtained at least three
or four reliable al Qaeda witnesses who were present during the
initial filming and they all will swear under oath that OBL never
made reference to any of the events at TT on 9/11."
The trial phase
will be a mere "formality," concluded Harvard legal professor
Alan Dershowitz, who is coordinating the expected appeal phases
of the proceedings for the Egyptian and Kuwaiti accused. "We'll
get all this back into the civilian courts and into America where
it belongs. I think 3,000 of the Egyptian defendants will shortly
see their charges either dropped or reduced to misdemeanor assault
charges. The other 1,100 under threat of reckless endangerment convictions
are even less of a worry — all hearsay and coerced confessions.
I doubt whether more than a half-dozen felony conspiracy indictments
ever reach a jury. This was simply not a capital punishment case.
If the government had been watching my analysis on Geraldo,
this case would never even have gone to trial."
Cultural
Icons to Play Critical Role?
Former
president Clinton, reached while delivering an inspirational speech
in Malibu, California, at first seemed hesitant about his reported
upcoming role in the trials. While legally barred from appearing
formally as counsel in some federal courts, the ex-president nevertheless
hinted that he has been retained by the Palestinian defendants —
and may appear as an expert but "hostile" witness to the
military's case.
"I'll
be offering more a historical perspective than anything else,"
Clinton volunteered. "I've been reading a lot lately. You know,
I've discovered that you cannot understand the Twin Towers without
some knowledge of Sherman's Sentinels. And we simply cannot call
the 8,000 accused "terrorists" without reference to Wounded
Knee. Did you know that Crusaders burned civilians in Jerusalem,
no less? We Americans use the word "terrorist" a lot —
but much of its real meaning depends on just how you define that
suffix '-ist.'"
The popular
American telejurist, Judge Judy, has been asked by prominent Islamic
clerics in Cairo to monitor the international jurists' ability to
navigate between Western law and the sharia. "I'm ready
when they are," Judge Judy remarked. "I'm here to translate
court to Koran, but I tell ya — if there's going to be a burqa
then this gal's going berserka."
Cultural critic
Edward Said was purportedly leading a stone-throwing demonstration
outside the U.S. military detention center. "Where are the
trials of U.S. combatants?" Said shouted over the noise. "An
American pilot sears a peasant with napalm and he is constructed
as a virtual hero — a freedom fighter below replies with a
flintlock and he is delegitimized as a terrorist?"
Said added:
"This entire case is little more than the distortion that characteristically
emanates from the edifice of control, in which the 'Other,' through
the fictive discourse of jurisprudence, is fictionalized into a
near-subhuman entity to reassure his oppressors that the purported
tools of civilization can maintain disequilibrium in the access
to power."
ACLU
Wish List?
Nadine
Strossen of the ACLU hinted at a series of sequential motions for
dismissal, and promised extensive fundraising to help ensure that
enough legal representation was on the ground in Islamabad —
at least through the expected first five years of in-court appeals.
Steven Shapiro, national legal director the ACLU, issued a terse
press release: "This is a travesty of American justice that
can only deprive some 8,000 accused of any reasonable chance at
a fair trial." An ACLU media guide accompanied Shapiro's strong
condemnation.
1) Documents
have been poorly translated. Arabic is a rich language with
a variety of dialects. Yet the U.S. military has assumed —
to the possible detriment of thousands of defendants — that
patois as rich and diverse as Kuwaiti and Egyptian and Lebanese
can be rendered into simple Arabic. And if the formal documents
are unreliable, there is even more concern about the quality of
the 7,500 in-court translators who are both inexperienced and underpaid.
We are in the process right now of discovering that very few of
the accused were read their Miranda rights in the proper dialects
of their native languages.
2) An untold number of the defendants may not be 18. No proof
exists that they are of legal age to be tried as adults in felony
trials. At least 2,000 cases must immediately be referred to juvenile
courts.
3) The question of mental soundness has been entirely neglected.
Even the meager preliminary pool of 300 psychiatrists estimates
that 4,000 defendants alone may be suffering from bipolar disorder,
neurosis, and chronic depression. Bin Laden himself had a documented
history of child abuse, parental neglect, and mental suffering.
The effect of polygamy on childhood adjustment in mass-murderers
is still not fully understood in the West — though a logical
criterion for dismissal.
4) The quality of legal representation remains in serious question.
While the wealthier of the accused have had access to impressive
American representation, we suggest that perhaps as many as 2,000
now in detention will be no more than wards of the court. And despite
the presence of the 12,000 public defenders in Islamabad, few are
seasoned enough to handle capital cases of this magnitude.
5) We believe that even the present 4,500 counselors and mental-health
workers are hardly sufficient even to begin to deal with the confirmed
cases of PTSS (Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome). Thousands of
the defendants were under constant bombardment for weeks, and remain
in a virtual catatonic state. We shall be filing friends-of-the-court
briefs to seek somewhere between 3,800 and 4,200 postponements,
of from six to ten years, until proper mental health can be restored.
6) At least 3,500 of the accused were assigned extraordinarily
unreasonable bail. As a result, none have seen their families
for weeks and, in some cases, even months. There is no documented
history that any of these unfortunates has had any past record of
violating conditions of parole. We want them released immediately.
Outcome
Uncertain?
An
apparently shaky Robert Shapiro, who has increasingly taken a secondary
role in the defense of the Hamas and Hezbollah accused, sounded
a rare note of apprehension — just hours before the trial was
scheduled to commence. "I'm a little disturbed about some of
the occasional anti-Semitism I'm hearing from one or two of my defendants
— and all dealt from the bottom of the deck, no less."
However, chief
co-prosecutors for the U.S. military legal corps, Marcia Clark and
Christopher Darden, reassured Americans about the ultimate verdict.
"Oh, no, no, no — we're not worried at all. We are convinced
that we can try and win all these cases in Islamabad. I have confidence
that the Pakistani man in the street will stand up to the plate
and put these 8,000 away for a long, long time to come."
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