Making Sense
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Well, I must say that things don’t make a great deal of sense this morning.
Secretary Rumsfeld was pretty impressive on the Hill yesterday, and he said many of the right things, and seemed sincere in his apology to the abused Iraqis, and even offered some of them compensation. So the Department seems on track to handle things the way it normally does, spending our money with grim efficiency for all manner of things.
But Mr. Rumsfeld said there was much worse to come. We appear to have real war criminals in of midst, vipers held against the lily-white bosom of the institution I served for so long.
In the context of what the President calls “The horrible pictures,” I noted in the Times this morning that in Arizona, prisoners inmates are made to wear women’s pink underwear. Right here in Virginia, new inmates are forced to wear black hoods. Some prisoners say they have been beaten, and made to crawl. In Texas, a judge had to impose an order to prevent guards from permitting inmate kingpins from operating a sex bazaar featuring the less powerful prisoners. There was no comment from the Bench on what they had to wear.
Meanwhile, the Mr. Hamill has returned to Mississippi, to the bosom of his family. That might be the best news to salvage out of this grim weekend, since it gets stranger. There are a lot of people trying to make sense out of things this morning.
For example, they are going to go ahead and charge Pfc England, the pert little war criminal from West Virginia, with conspiracy and assault. They still haven’t nailed an officer, much less a significant one, and that is going to be the interesting part. Mr. Rumsfeld said he took full responsibility, so I imagine if this follows its logical course, he might be going home. But probably not to jail.
It is odd to consider a pensive Rumsfeld at the breakfast table this morning, or at least as pensive as that supremely confident smart guy can get. And I imagine they are still puzzling at England home over in Fort Ashby, and the Mayfields in Kansas.
The Mayfields are a nice American family. They have a son who lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is a practicing attorney. That wasn’t the first thing that tipped off the FBI, but the fact that Brandon was a convert to Islam and a specialist in immigration issues certainly looked suspicious when combined with the other thing.
The Bureau says that a single fingerprint found in a van in Madrid matches one of Brandon’s. It is on a container that held some of the detonators that the terrorists used to kill 191 in the train bombings.
I don’t know what to make of it, thought it is obviously more theoretical for me here in Big Pink than it is in a middle-class home in Kansas. Brandon probably was identified because his fingerprints were taken when he served in the Army, around the time he converted to Islam.
The Bureau supposedly has embarked on the creation of a great information-sharing program in which a central repository of fingerprints and DNA records can be searched. When the Spanish police turned up the print, it was scanned and compared with millions in the data base. Out popped Brandon’s name, and with the other circumstantial evidence, they arrested him as a material witness.
They thought he might run away, though these days it is not clear where. The data-bases are getting hooked up and Customs and cops and all sorts of people will be able to tell whether you have paid your parking tickets, or handled detonator caps. It occurs to me that my prints are in that data-base, too. It was a condition of employment in some odd places. I don’t recall precisely the last time I handled high explosives, but I have as a condition of employment.
I have no idea whether Brandon is guilty of some association with a monstrous crime. I am inclined to be suspicious of converts of any sort, since they tend to be filled with a zeal that is alien to me. I also am suspicious of lawyers in general, and immigration advocates in particular.
But I am very concerned that a single fingerprint can result in crawling around in pink panties and a black hood.
They say that the chances of having an identical print with anyone else is very slim. The smart guys tell us that all the grains of sand on the beach are different, and that all the snowflakes unique.
But I have never really believed that. It doesn’t make sense.
Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra |
May 8, 2004
DailySocotra
