Damned If You Do and Damned If You Do: A Lesson In Symbolism

It’s striking, when you stop to think about it, how large an unspoken role symbolism plays in our understanding of the world and the ways in which we organize our lives. There are words, sounds, colours, images, clothing, objects, and even intonations that we don’t acknowledge on an almost second by second basis that trigger certain deeply held meanings for us and fundamentally inform how we wind up understanding a given experience. These symbols and the impact on our perception of things are so pervasive that one can stand side-by-side with a good friend, become exposed to the same set of variables and dynamics making up an experience, and interpret what happened in totally divergent ways.

That symbolism seems to operate on a myriad of levels and in an infinite number of contexts, from the tiniest of everyday interactions to the most expansive of meta-narratives. And more often than not, I think, we remain largely unconscious of this component of our perception and conception of the world. It was against the backdrop of that thinking that I happened to listen again to On Point’s November 16 podcast about the upcoming trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed et al. and it was just that kind of thinking that has lead me to see the whole trial within the prism of a lose-lose matrix of outcomes.

After some basic background and context from ABC’s Jake Tapper, the two primary guests on the show, John Hutson and Walter Huffman, were introduced and allowed provide their opening remarks on the topic at hand. Those remarks, in many senses, perfectly set the stage for why I think  almost everything at play with this trial is rooted in symbolism and why I fail to see how any of it will result in a positive outcome.

John Hutson started off by saying, when asked about the decision to try Mohammed in a civilian,

Tom, I think it’s exactly the right thing to do. Not to disparage military justice at all, for which I have a great affection and admiration. But, that a couple of points I’d want to make I guess in this context, one is that I think of KSM and his cohorts as criminals, ah, not as war fighters and not as soldiers, but just as criminals. So I think that prosecuting them in US District court is the right thing to do because that’s where we prosecute criminals.

Walter Huffman then followed up with the below counterpoint,

Well I do have reservations, Tom, and I think with all due respect to my good friend John Hutson, I think that one of the first things you have to look at is: is this a crime or is it terrorism? And one of the things that seems to be left out of this conversation to a certain extent is, for example, I lost a very good friend – several good freinds — but one very good friend in the Pentagon on the same day and then of course there was Flight 93 that ended up in Pennsylvania. So, this was not just an attack on New York, this was an attack on America by people who weren’t out to rob a bank or just knock people out of the way. They didn’t care who they killed, really, as long as they could influence the United States government to do something they wanted them to do and to intimidate America. And that’s the difference between a crime and terrorism and in my mind its very clear that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his cohorts are terrorists of the worst kind.

Huffman tows a familiar line in regards to Mohammed et al. and why they must be tried within a military context: they are terrorists and therefore must be held to account within a military context because that is where terrorists are appropriately dealt with. This precisely what former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has explcitly said.  That argument is usually followed by a raft of others, such as the security risks posed to New York and, interestingly for the purposes of this post, that holding the trial in New York will give Mohammed et al. a platform to spew their anti-American hatred and possible criticism of the Bush administration, as well as make their case against the West.

Basically, the argument runs that by trying Mohammed et al. in a civilian court in New York, the Obama administration is playing into Mohammed’s narrative of being a martyr and enabling his ability to continue to make that case further and wider than Mohammed would otherwise be able if the trial were in a military context. Let me offer that Giuliani et al have largely already done Mohammed’s work for him and that their demand for a military trial is rooted in a spoken but unacknowledged symbology that has played into Mohammed’s hand since long before the announcement of this trial.

By which I mean that hawks like Giuliani have, from almost the outset of 9-11, bought in hook, line, and sinker to the notion that Mohammed and Bin Laden are the promlegats of a civilizational war, the outcome of which will determine the very fate of the planet. This type of thinking is Manichean to the core, it’s symbolism is giant and sweeping, it represents the perrenial battle between “good and evil” and, at the end of the day, serves the purposes of everyone involved: both Giuliani-Bush style neocons and their adherents (who, I think it is fair to say, remain far more ubiquitous within the cracks of American foreign policy than popular distaste would leave one to believe, see: Obama’s recent Afhgan announcement), as well as Mohammed, Bin Laden, and the mouth pieces of Al Qaeda. Everyone gets to cast themselves as key players in this epic drama. Everyone gets to valorize their very existence and purpose. And everyone gets to declare the purity and righteousness of their message/mission.

The platform on which Mohammed a et al. have been delivering their vision and message is much larger than any they might achieve by being tried in a civilian court in New York and they’ve had access to that platform for a good long while.

In contrast, Hutson’s comments actually serve to de-emphasize the larger narrative into which both Giuliani and Mohammed’s (and by extension, Huffman’s) comments feed. Hutson is prepared to acknowledge that these are men who have done great wrong and who deserve to be held account and subject to justice, but by caling them criminals he manages to avoid the symbolic quicksand by refusing the elevate the stature of the recipients to the same pedestal as his interlocutors. “Look,” Hutson as much as says, “let’s not give these guys more recognition than they deserve. They are thugs and wrongdoers and we will deal with them in the same fashion we deal with all individuals of their kind.” It’s a message that is grounded and simple and, ultimately, effective in decharging the larger context of the trial.

Except that the further, and what winds up being ultimate, justification that seems to fall out of most arguments for a civilian tiral is, itself, symbolic and, I think, ultimately doomed as well. The reason for trying Mohammed et al in New York is demonstrate the fundamental victory of Western values over the values of Al Qaeda and so-called “Islamofascism” and the successful trial will provide the world and Americans with the example of justice that is so badly needed in order to move beyond this world altering event.

Perhaps no one has summed the need up more eloquently than Andrew Sullivan,

I think it’s a potentially brilliant move. I do not believe for one moment that this case was brought in a civilian court without sufficient evidence to convict KSM of criminality to put him away for good. But what an open civilian case will also do – and it’s why a war criminal like John Yoo is so apoplectic – is reveal the extent to which the brutal torture of KSM was unnecessary, and led to the government’s inability to prosecute him to the full extent of the law.

It will be a civic lesson to America and the world. It will show the evil of terrorism and the futility and danger of torture. It will be a way in which Cheney’s torture regime can be revealed in all its grotesque excess at the same time as KSM’s vile religious extremism is exposed for its murderous nihilism. That all this will take place in New York – close to where the mass murder took place – is a particularly smart touch.

This will, then, be a Nuremberg-style event – because it will pit Qaeda barbarism against the cooling, calm and resolute nature of real Western justice in the clear light of history. But it does one more critical thing. It reveals a new confidence in ourselves and the Western way of life.

All of which would be great, if I thought it stood a chance of working. But I don’t think it does.

The average American’s mind isn’t resting on the need for retribution in realizing justice for the horrific wrongs perpetrated against their country. No, most Americans are wondering how they will continue to make ends meet next month, whether they will continue to have a job, if they don’t continue to have a job what they will do, if they don’t currently have a job how they are going to get ne as quickly as possible, when this god forsaken recession will finally come to an end, who is to blame for this radical shift in the quality of their lives, and what impact healthcare reform will have on all of this. And the rest of the world has, frankly, largely moved on already. People from England to China and largely worrying about the same things as their American counterparts, they wonder what the future of the world looks like, and they are struggling with challenges that are specific to their corner of the world and don’t get the same kind of prime time exposure, some of which are matters of life or death in their own right.

The story about the great struggle between the West and Al Qaeda has, at this point, largely been defined by its witnesses as an exercise in misdirection and irresponsibility. The symbolism has largely been laid down, analyses have been run, interpretations provided, understandings reached. In what venue Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s trial takes place will, ultimately, have little impact on that essentially completed process because it isn’t a live issue for most outside of the US (and perhaps a handful of other western countries) anymore.

And so the symbolism of this civilian trial is left a cataclysmic catharsis without an audience.

With the likelihood of conviction relatively level in both arenas, the impact of the symbolic guesture offered by proponents of a civlian trial will likely, as predicted, devolve into the same media circus this whole set of events has been from the start, primarily due to the symbolic meaning previously laid down and fed into by the proponents of a military trial. Which leaves us… in need of learning much bigger lessons from the past eight years and asking much bigger questions than where Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s trial ought to be held.

Tagged as: al-Qaeda, George W. Bush, obama, On Point