WHERE DID THEY GET THE IDEA?

A May 25th report informs us that the CIA had a whole bunch of stuff ready to make Saddam look bad in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

I hold no brief for the deceased. I point out (it’s been 7 years now) that this unsavory gentleman was a dictator, a bloody oppressor of his own people, and a secularist – perhaps even an atheist, at least in his philosophy of government. Oh, and a long-time ally of the United States, beneficiary of a goodly amount of financial and military largesse.

Anyhoo, once it was decided that he would make a useful enemy and target, the CIA went into creativity mode to make him look bad. The war, after all, being somewhat dubious and techy from a legal standpoint, public opinion would play an even more significant role than usual.

How to make him look bad?

Members of the SO community will not be surprised to learn that the government planned to make him look like a “pedophile”.

THAT, of course, was a handy way of demonizing a potential target and so lubricating your path to legally dubious undertakings. After all, the ‘sex offender’ had become – and not by accident – America’s demon du jour by that time (in that same year, the US Supreme Court declared that Alaska’s Megan’s Law was constitutional, overriding in the process that State’s own Supreme Court, which clearly ‘just didn’t get it’).

It was no accident that ‘sex offenders’ and ‘pedophiles’ – used more or less interchangeably as terms of public outrage and opprobrium – had become such a handy weapon. State and Federal legislators and jurists, ably assisted by the media which itself was fed all sorts of ‘science’, ‘research’, and ‘numbers’ by this and that ‘advocacy’ and cottage-industry ‘expert’ … they had all chipped in to pretty much design and develop this latest target-vessel against which the pols could demonstrate their law-making chops, through which the jurists could override legal principle and precedent to show that they too could shape the world, and off which the media could make a hefty bundle. What was not to like?

And, of course, rather than wonder about what their legislators were doing to further their common weal, the voters – with information thoughtfully provided by those same legislators – could occupy themselves hunting sex offenders around town.

Meanwhile, back at the CIA, the plan was hatched – did they have to really think hard about this? – to make a fake video showing Saddam (or a look-alike) having sex with a teenage boy.
The boy was a nice touch; it could have been a girl but that might not have bothered so many folks – even among the legislative and media and enforcement elites.

But as Tolkien noted in his famous trilogy, there are times when evil’s own plans create the causes of their own frustration. A ‘pedophile’ is attracted to prepubescent children, not teens. The scenario of Saddam with a teenager would indicate ‘ephebephilia’ – although that term doesn’t roll off the tongue so easily, and why confuse public reaction and slow down public outrage with any more ‘science’ than you have to?

And, by the by, clinical thought considers the attraction to teens – especially the older they are – as far less of a rehabilitative problem than the attraction to prepubescents. So perhaps somebody might have come up with the idea that if America were invading in order to rehabilitate the offender, then a lesser therapeutic regimen – sanctions or some time at a secure rehab center – would have done the job.

And saved the lives of a whole lotta grown-ups and ‘children’ in the bargain.

But doctors and diplomats operate in different worlds, and when you’ve tossed ‘evil’ into the bargain, then there’s nothing for it but to drag the valuable cannon all over the shop and start slamming away at point-blank range.

So this was an emergency and surely ‘national security’ was as vital as ‘public safety’ and anyway who paid much attention to specifics? In the Great Cause of Doing Emergency Good there is indeed such a vice as ‘thinking too much’. And of course, nowadays, just about everything is an emergency … so I don’t have a good feeling about how it will all end.

As it may have already occurred to you, there is some connection here between sex-offenses and the invasions.

Although it’s curious that there isn’t anywhere near so much American outrage or ‘concern’ about the actual long-standing general impression that adult tribal fighters in the Afghani milieu have a tendency to form particular attachments to teenage boys (which perhaps they got from Alexander, whom they also defeated). It’s a funny thing about this sex-offender outrage … how it can latch onto something here and pretty much not-notice something there.

Of course, the Afghanis have a couple of things going for them that American sex-offenders of any type don’t have: the US government needs the Afghanis – not only to beat the Taliban forces but also to not-beat the American forces. Funny how quickly ‘concern’ and ‘outrage’ become ‘strategic’ … it makes you start to think the stuff can be turned on and off like a faucet.

So much for principle or the claim that It’s OK to break the laws in order to get at sex-offenders because God Made Me Do It. Or out of ‘concern’. Whichever.

Americans targeted as ‘sex offenders’ have no such protections. They only have the Constitution, which both Left and Right have declared to be either “defective” or “quaint”. When you as a Citizen are faced with an assault by government and you plan to meet the attack armed with ideals and principles … you’re sorta pretty much bringing the proverbial knife to the proverbial gunfight.

The government subscribes to the old military adage: if they have pistols, you bring rifles; if they have rifles, you bring machine guns; if they have machine guns you bring grenades – and you ALWAYS bring artillery.

Which is a fine principle for conducting victorious military operations: bring enough force to win decisively and quickly. If it’s ‘a fair fight’, then somebody screwed up.

It’s not such a good idea for police and prosecutors – so often former military themselves – to bring those ideas to be deployed against Citizens in civil or criminal cases. *

But the military approach is much more useful to dedicated and impatient Deputies of both the Left and the Right: in military law, as in any other aspect of military operations, the Mission and the Success and Achievement of the Objective – Victory, in a word – is the only guiding principle. And nothing will be allowed to obstruct the achievement of Victory.

It is this iron rule that has contaminated the pool of Constitutional defenders: because if Constitutional principles are standing in the way of you achieving The Objective, then those principles have to be ‘neutralized’. This is as true for the Left as for the Right.

And it was the gimlet-eyed ‘sensitivity’ of the Left that bonded with the ‘law and order’ and ‘anti-Evil’ of the Right to create the Victimist approach to law that found its most recent apotheosis in the Sex Offense Mania and the erection – as if it were a dark idol – of the Sex Offender as the latest national Boogyeman.**

So what this Saddam story says to me is that the government got the idea to sex-offender (used here as a transitive verb) him from what it had ‘achieved’ against Citizens domestically. And – alas – without effective public opposition.

And worse, that sex-offenders are the combined targets of the Left’s ‘reforming’ urges and the Right’s ‘restraining’ urges and their combined Victimist ‘revenging’ urges … although for sly efficiency’s sake the whole complex coalition’s bundle of motivations is fronted by ‘public safety’ the same way the current (not to say successful) wars are fronted by ‘national security’.

And worse, that both the Left’s revolutionary approach and the Right’s military approach both require the flattening of the Constitutional walls precisely designed to prevent an assault on the rights of Citizens.***

So I think that the assorted Oath-bound legislators, jurists, and others have pretty much settled in to a ‘war’ against ‘sex offenders’ – one which, as long as the Constitution is kept locked up in the basement they are guaranteed to win.

Which – alas – may go some way toward explaining Obama’s recent embrace of AWA and all its pomps and all its works: he needs to pander to whatever ‘bases’ he can, and the Sex Offense Mania will make both Left and Right ‘happy’.

Thus, as I recall reading on one of the SO sites last night, he is pouring lots of money into the Byrne legal funds pot, so that States who refuse to comply with AWA will lose a larger amount of actual funds (the 10% they won’t get that will be split up among the States that went along with this frakkulous regime) … this is not how good legislation progresses: you don’t have to force States to accept a good idea, you don’t have to bribe them and threaten them and sleazily manipulate the situation so that the State legislators are put in an impossible situation.

You don’t need to do that with good laws.

But Obama needs to do it with AWA.

And the courts and legislatures of the land have to do it with the whole Sex Offense Mania regime.

They are corroding the Constitutional ethos that protects Us all.

NOTES

*And it was one of my first tip-offs that something verrrrrry bad had gotten loose in domestic law enforcement when the earliest Federal sex-offender legislation included – like a mantra – ‘or convicted by military courtmartial’: it told me that something very dark, that had been caged within the military setting, had now felt strong enough to brazenly strut among us in the bright light of national domestic legislation. You may rest most surely assured that any military justice event is conducted along the same principles as outlined above: they never go in for a ‘fair fight’ and if you are ‘downrange’ then you’d best make your arrangements while you can.

And, of course, that un-caging was just the first of many un-cagings as long-established Constitutional principles collapsed, their erstwhile Oath-bound defenders not defeated but rather actually digging out the foundations from under them.

**I am not implying here that there is no such thing as ‘victimization’. Nor am I claiming here that such a lethally unholy consequence was actively and deliberately intended. But the elements were loosed and that’s how they came together, and the Sex Offense Mania is what the interaction of those elements has created.

***When I get this Nussbaum Post up (and I finished taking the notes last night) you will be treated to the dizzying experience of having traditional ‘rights’ declared inoperative in the pious and brassily hopeful assertion of better ‘rights’. As if – at 30,000 feet – you could reasonably imagine that you could replace propeller engines with jet engines without creating too many problems for yourself. And your passengers.


ADDENDA

I have just come across two interesting bits that are of relevance to SO concerns.

First, and remarkably, there is a report that the new British coalition government is promising to take broad and deep action to reverse the trend of corroding civil liberties that has swept that unhappy Isle for several decades now.

Roll-backs will include the government pressure for a National ID card. There will be a re-expanded concept of Freedom of Information in matters of government transparency, the restoration of rights of non-violent protest, safeguards against misuse of anti-terrorism legislation and restrictions on the use of CCTV security cams, and others.

Of special interest to the SO community are “the protection of historic freedoms through the defense of trial by jury” and “a new mechanism to prevent the proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offenses”.

The entire Sex Offense Mania regime has been an example – but not the only example – of such proliferation. The concepts of victimist-feminist law and the political dynamics of same were hugely responsible for the pressure to take what were already criminal offenses and erect them into a Miasm or Web of ‘sex offenses’ perpetrated by the demonic evil class called ‘sex offenders’, whose dark and vigorous existence (like the alleged ‘domestic Red’ conspiracies of the 1920s and the early Cold War) required the corrosion of traditional Constitutional safeguards.

And as I have often said, both the law-and-order Right and the ‘constitution-is-quaint-and-oppressive’ Left could get in bed about it.

One of the darkly elegant mechanisms of a Mania – as both Lefty Reds and Righty Nazis discovered in the early 20th century – is that once you have stampeded public opinion, then the jury pool is tainted before the fact, before the potential jury members are even summonsed to duty. And this tainting is done by the government and its media collaborators … but in such a way that no criminal act of jury-tampering can be proved. This is the new government-advocacy-media crime of ‘jury tainting’, I’d call it.

If this Brit thing comes true, it will be amazing to see a major government – or any government – actually promising to roll-back its grip on power that it has taken to itself.

If it works, then this is indeed going to be one of the watershed moments in human history.

Second, Glenn Greenwald – attorney and acute commentator on the Salon Magazine site – has put up an article entitled “New targets of rights erosions: U.S. citizens”.

It’s worth a look, certainly.

But I note again that like so many many many of the major and minor public commentators, Greenwald completely ignores the Sex Offense Mania regime as he recounts the history of rights-erosions in this country.

Not that he is the only commentator who does that. From the Left, it all started with Bush-Cheney; from the Right it has to do with the Democrats from 1968-2000. But noooobody mentions the Sex Offense Mania regime.

This cannot be a coincidence. I am NOT saying that there is some commentator-conspiracy, or that there is some secret guidebook on what to talk about and what not-to.

But I am saying that they all instinctively seem to know that the Sex Offense Mania regime is something that they can’t talk about. If you're a commentator with a reputation of even minimal competence that you'd like to keep, then you can't endanger your creds by attacking it, and you can't endanger your competence by agreeing with it. The result being that the whole regime has pretty much disappeared from mainstream public discourse.

I think it’s because both Left and Right are so deeply implicated in it; and because you’d have to do some real Tire-Kicking against victimism and feminism as they have evolved in public policy and law … and you’re bound to create an awful lot of discomfort in an awful lot of places by doing that.

And perhaps also, it’s clear to many otherwise insightful commentators that the entire Sex Offense Mania regime is such an embarrassing and frakkulent mess that there is no way to try to approach it. There is no way to examine it without exposing the verrrry queasy perversions (I couldn’t resist!) of law, truth, integrity, and Oath-bound responsibility by legislators and jurists, as well as the self-serving tactical machinations of media and the cottage-industry experts and advocacies.

And lastly, the commentators themselves – no matter how prominent – are wary of the awesomely dangerous and primitively irrational characteristic now established (again) in American public discourse: if you don’t hate them totally then you must be one of them. Or: if you don’t hate ‘it’ totally, then you must be ‘for’ it.

And once such immaturity has taken root (again) in public discourse, then the potential for serious corrective action is greatly compromised.