Darwin Award

When I was briefly a member of the Democratic Party in the mid 1990s, I was amused at the looks I’d get when asking why the party’s annual Jefferson-Jackson dinner celebrated a slave owner and an Indian killer. Reading a recent pleading by Defense Department lawyers attempting to conjure loopholes to avoid civilian court review of its military commissions, I was not surprised to learn that when General Jackson illegally invaded Spanish Florida to punish Seminole Indians for aiding runaway slaves, the earlier military commission cited in the recent pleading was equally myopic.

With the Wikileaks exposure of ongoing war crimes and coverups by the Pentagon in their current Central Asia adventure, using military commissions to punish humanitarians like Bradley Manning and Julian Assange may seem like a good idea to Defense Department lawyers, but history does not bear out their claim.

Blaming the Department of Defense for getting caught up in the idiocy of Congress and the corruption of the White House may not be entirely justified, but then, neither is scapegoating Native Americans for defending themselves against genocide, or demonizing whistleblowers for providing documentation of that lethal idiocy. It almost seems that DoD is competing with the Department of Justice for the Darwin Award.