Rob's Rants

I occasionally turn on Boston talk radio station WTKK on my 3 mile drive home in the evening. So I usually only get to listen to a few minutes of  Michele McPhee’s nighttime rants. This Friday (November 13th) I was driving a different route, so I caught a longer bit of her show.

I normally hear a lot of misleading stuff on talk radio … but true ignorance is thankfully a little more rare. Except for this Friday. Sometime between 7:30 and 8:00 PM McPhee was ranting about the Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement of the trial of 9/11 conspirators in New York. I’m not really sure what her point was, other than this was “outrageous” and that Barack Obama is a coward, and that the conspirators shouldn’t be tried at all but should be left to rot in Guantanemo Bay. But at one point, talking with a caller, she paraphrased Rudy Giuliani and claimed that he said that we would not have tried the people who bombed Pearl Harbor (See this … figures he would have uttered this crap on Fox). And McPhee was using this point to contrast how weak the United States is behaving now versus how tough we used to be. [Edit: 11/15/09. In fairness to Rudy, by today someone has given him a history lesson and he has backed off the 'no trials for war criminals' shtick. And while his current stance that having the trial in New York is a security risk has some merit, his original statement is still a crock ...]

I can forgive most talk radio amplification of esoteric or improbable events. But complete ignorance of modern history is inexcusable. For those who don’t realize it, the United States did in fact place over 5000 Japanese on trial for Class A, Class B, and Class C war crimes. Although officially a military tribunal, since we were occupying Japan at the time and civilian government wasn’t fully functional, the tribunal was presided over by a largely civilian panel. Much information is available at Wikipedia’s entry for the Military Tribunal for the Far East.

I think some perspective is in order for Mr. Giuliani, Ms. McPhee, and the rest of the outraged right wing regarding the trial of the 9/11 conspirators. There is ample precedent for trying truly horrible people for crimes committed while engaged in war. In addition to the Military Tribunal for the Far East, we have of course the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. Let’s think on this for a moment. After winning the total and utter surrender of Germany, the Allies, lead by Josef Stalin (not known for his restraint or for being a softie) and Harry Truman (who had the balls to drop not just one, but two nuclear bombs on Japan) accepted a trial as an appropriate forum for deciding the punishment of people who were accused of slaughtering in cold blood 12.5 million civilians and POWs. I’ll say that again in ways that even talk radio hosts can understand:

They killed 12.5 million fucking civilians. And we put them on trial in a court.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 conspirators killed 3000 Americans, if you stretch to include many residual casualties. So I think that a trial is also a reasonable forum for a civilized society to use in this case.

At best Giuliani’s statement is ignorant. Ignorant of the modern history that any American high school student should be expected to know. At worst, it, and McPhee’s parroting of it is intentionally playing to the worst emotional instincts of other ignorant Americans and is representative of everything wrong with the right wing of the Republican party in America today. They should be ashamed. Quite simply this one statement diminishes what respect I had for Rudy and reduces him almost to “Bluto” Blutarski from Animal House railing about the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor …

So, let me end this by pointing out how America and other civilized societies have dealt with similar situations:

So let’s not even start to think that there isn’t precedent for murderous a-holes being put in trial for their crimes. It’s what civilized people do. Apparently Rudy Giuliani and Michele McPhee don’t fit in that group.

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