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June 17, 2002
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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|
June 17,
2002
The Assault
on Trial by Jury
Law
and Orders
by Ron Sullivan
This has been bothering me since well before September
11, but it's been getting more acute since then, and even worse
since the announcement of the arrest of Abdullah al Mujadir.
People in the US are carrying on about
who has the right to trial by jury, and who has the right to
an open civil trial rather than a closed and secret military
tribunal. There's an old saying that military justice is to justice
as military music is to music, and it's more than just a field-corporal's
gripe. But the thought behind it is lost lately, as something
much more important is being lost, fogged over, drowned out.
Apparently the public has forgotten -- if it ever learned --
why trial by jury and the presumption of innocence matter to
our legal system.
There seems to be a ground-level perception
that these two principles are somehow a privilege that we are
heir to by our birth as US citizens, an hereditary perk like
a samurai's right to be fed by the peasants. Because it's seen
as a privilege -- even though we call it a "right"
-- it's also seen as revocable, as something we can lose access
to if we somehow don't deserve it. It's also seen as somehow
belonging exclusively to us, a mistake our own laws have come
to foster. Someone accused of a particularly foul crime is seen
as beyond the pale, and jury trials and presumption of innocence
reside only well within that social -- and geographic -- boundary.
In part, this is a normal enough reaction of anger at the crime
itself and at the criminal, a way of separating ourselves utterly
from anyone who would commit such a horror.
But the problem with this stance isn't
its lack of brotherly empathy. It's not even its failure to put
ourselves in the accused's shoes for a theoretical moment. The
problem is its lack of science.
I'm no legal scholar, but I do remember
enough history to have noticed that the American Revolution,
economic issues aside, was a child of the European Enlightenment.
Along with its ancestry in English common law, our court system
owes its beginning to the idea that truth is discoverable by
human means, and that those means are accessible to any human
who cares to work enough to learn them. The Enlightenment includes
a cluster of big ideas -- bigger, and in progress more democratic,
than the men who most famously advanced them. Like English common
law, they set precedents and spread basic assumptions that went
beyond anything their original promulgators could have imagined.
And, as the American revolution surprised and angered some elements
of English society, the access to fact and process that science
allows has moved way beyond the elite in whose hands it was supposed
to rest -- and there's still backlash from people who presume
themselves its rightful heirs.
The idea that no one is inherently more
fit to discover truths than anyone else, and that what's needed
for the task is work, seems to be a hard one for humans to swallow.
We treat physicians as priests, demanding the Truth from them
right now and once and for all, and wonder why they get arrogant.
We allow elected officials to tell us they know best without
revealing just what they know and how they know it, and don't
notice until it steps on our own toes that we've subsidized tyranny.
We forget, or ignore, the basis for our whole system of reasoning,
which is not "Take my word for it" but "See for
yourself."
Open jury trials are as democratic --
and as reason-based -- as science is. As a scientist must openly
display his or her experiments, described carefully enough that
anyone can replicate them, to be taken seriously, so evidence
for any crime and the reason for any punishment must be open
to examination by anyone who is expected to concur with either.
Justice isn't just fair; it's factual. It can't be fair without
being fact-based and reasonable.
The founders of the US endorsed the open
jury trial not just because they saw it as cutting everybody
an even break, but because like their European brethren they
saw it as the best available method to find out what was true.
We still haven't found a better one.
Torture, for example, works no better
now than it did for the Inquisition. Of course, the Inquisition
grew out of a different concept of truth: less a matter of discovery
than of agreement with one's divinely ordained superiors. Agreement
is easier to extract via torture than real information is. Assumptions
about the likelihood of crime among entire groups of people --
"profiling" -- lead to the sort of blunders that we
laugh at today, even as we commit more of them. Think of Lombroso
and his "criminal profile" based on head shape, or
Dr. Down and his equating of a certain suite of congenital disorders
with the development of the "Mongoloid" "race."
Any of these can assume, have assumed the mantle of science without
actually being quite scientific enough, because they proceed
from assumptions they are then supposed to prove.
The presumption of innocence is a precise
and basic counter to just such faulty procedure. It's not a matter
of washing away original sin, or inventing a purity of soul for
people who seem to have none. It's a matter of cleaning the tools,
of making a good experiment, of clearing our own minds in order
to get it right. We aren't watching a mysterious rite here, something
that an ordained Other can complete by going through a set of
motions. It's something We the People must do for ourselves.
We can't assign the work of justice to somebody else and look
away, any more than we can delegate our own education. Law must
have science as its goal -- and its method. And nobody can do
it but a vigilant, rational, and patient people.
Ron Sullivan
is the Garden Editor for Faultline,
California's Environmental Magazine.
She can be reached at: rons@dnai.com
Today's
Features
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
David Vest
Shut Up
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