The Kangaroo Justice

On Monday it was the turn of bin Laden in Pakistan — if it was really him, since for “reasons of national security” President Obama didn’t allow us to see the photos and the body was immediately thrown to the fish. His elimination by a group of Rambos, received at the White House and decorated as heroes, was justified by Attorney General Eric Holder as a “legitimate act of national self-defense.” On Thursday, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, in Rome to take stock of the Libyan crisis, said in an interview that Gadhafi and his family are legitimate targets of the humanitarian missiles (possibly Italian), although “this is not the objective of the mission.”

Yesterday came the news, published by the Wall Street Journal and not denied by the Pentagon, that on Thursday a U.S. drone — one of those unmanned aircraft bombers that, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are responsible for daily massacres of Taliban militants and some civilians intent on celebrating weddings and banquets — had fired a missile on a car that was traveling in a province of Yemen in the hopes of hitting Anwar al-Awlaki. He is a radical imam of Yemen, born in the U.S., considered the leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and one of the candidates to take the place left vacant by bin Laden. Al-Awlaki wasn’t in the car, and the missile struck and killed two other men, two brothers. But that’s okay for now because they were probably al-Qaida too. There will be other chances, drones or special teams to take him, since the CIA was ordered in April to take him “dead or alive.”

These days, much has been written on the “legitimacy” of murdering the murderers. During the mandates of Bush and Cheney, the problem didn’t arise. They claimed America’s natural or acquired “right” to make all the wars they may consider necessary, to kidnap and torture people, to open concentration camps — let’s call them lagers — such as Guantanamo. For the asymmetric war “against terrorism” all was licit, even that kind of “Kangaroo Justice” which is generally attributed to “rogue states” and barbaric princes, but never to the country that counts among its fathers people like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.

Historically speaking, the Kangaroo Justice (also cited in some rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court) was born in early in the 1800s and refers to the practice of itinerant judges who “jumped” from place to place along the “frontier” of the United States and were paid based on the number of trials they held and convicted they hanged. So, a justice good only for the Wild West of the beginning of the 1800s. But good also, it seems, for today’s global Far West. For global bandits like bin Laden and Gadhafi (but not Assad, strangely enough, maybe because Syria is a bit more “strategic” than Libya?), for global sheriffs like Bush and, too bad, even the nice Obama. It’s the old and timeless biblical model of an eye for an eye, the model of revenge and reprisal, the model of extra-judicial executions and “targeted killings” made popular by the Israelis.

Justice, human rights, citizenship rights, dictatorship and democracy are relative, volatile and variable concepts. Not only for the United States and what we schematically define as the West, models of legal and political culture, but also for “humanitarian” organizations like the UN and the International Criminal Court. Which, incidentally, with the exception of a few ex-Yugoslavians, so far have dealt only with “black” criminals and haven’t found any “white” men worthy of trial and condemnation. The Kangaroo Justice.