‘Innocent until proven guilty’ applies to all
Commentary by Beau Elliot

No, no, a thousand times no.

“The Secretary of Defense practicing his Shakespeare?” you ask.

Not exactly. That’s Donald Rumsfeld telling us that the Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners the United States is keeping in cages in Cuba are not prisoners of war.

You see, if they were prisoners of war, they’d be covered by the Geneva Convention, which means that America couldn’t do whatever it damn well pleases with them. Right now, what America seems to want to do with them is wait for the next hurricane to blow them all into the Bermuda Triangle, where they can join the Florida ballots.

You see, these guys are evil incarnate. They’re the most evil people in the world, Rummy says.

So, they were in on the Sept. 11 attacks?

Not exactly.

The bombing of the USS Cole or the embassies in Africa?

No one has alleged that, either. But they’re evil, make no mistake. And they have no respect for fundamental human rights, unlike our allies in Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance and Afghan warlords, who have a long, unbesmirched record of standing up for human rights.

Say, didn’t the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese stick American POWs in cages?

Yes, they did, and they violated the Geneva Convention in doing so. That’s why the al Qaeda and Taliban guys in Cuba are not POWs. Even though King George and the rest of the administration have spent the last four months declaring that we’re at war, we weren’t really at war. Therefore, we don’t have POWs. Understand?

You see, sometimes defending the homeland gets even trickier than squeegeeing the books at Enron.

Wait a minute, you say. Why are we stashing prisoners in Cuba anyway?

First of all, they’re not prisoners, they’re just not free to go, and second of all, so we can demonstrate to Castro how dismal his record on human rights is.

The great bearded one has this tendency to throw people he doesn’t like into a Cuban prison and forget about them.

We, on the other hand, being a freedom-loving people, take people we don’t like and throw them into chainlink-fence cages in Cuba. Without the benefit of a trial.

Well, Rummy says, a cage in Cuba is warmer than a cave in Afghanistan.

Of course, he’s never been in an Afghan cave so it’s not as if he knows what he’s talking about.

But then, that’s never stopped him before.

This whole thing smacks of the kind of arrogance that has made America famous around the world. Go back to the weeks immediately following Sept. 11 and see what King George had to say about Osama bin Laden: This isn’t a question of guilt or innocence.

We know he’s guilty.

Well, if you’re so damn sure people are guilty, put them on trial and prove it to the world.

But don’t play totalitarian games. It makes people think we’re back in the U.S.S.R.

Or in Israel.

Of course, as opposed to the bad guys in Cuba, you can be sure that the King George/Stealth President Cheney administration is going to insist on fair, impartial trials for any Enron executives who might be brought up on charges.

Because when a God-fearing American business executive is accused of wrongdoing, as opposed to a bearded Muslim, that exec is probably simply being misunderstood, and most likely liberals looking for a witch hunt are at the root of the misunderstanding — which includes the leftist propensity to not quite comprehend the finer points of the parallel universe of economics.

That would be the cosmos in which losses become profits made by “partnerships,” such as the one the current secretary of the Army ran back when he was an Enron exec.

Of course, with all this off-the-books stuff, you do have to wonder at what point an auditor ceases to be an auditor and becomes a bookie.

No, no, a thousand times no.

Beau Elliot is an editorialist for The Daily Iowan at the University of Iowa. This column was distributed by U-Wire.

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