What is truth? Whatever neocons say it is.

I think this is all you need to know about neoconservatism and how the United States got into the pickle we're in. From American Enterprise Institute "Freedom Scholar" Michael Ledeen's blog at Pajamas Media:

My friend potkin azarmehr, whose blog is one of the very best, calls our attention to American complicity in the death of an Iranian dissident.

Majid Kavousifar, seen in these pictures before being hanged, left Iran for Abu Dhabi two days after the assassination of one of the corruptest and most repressive judges in the Islamic Republic. Judge Moghaddas who was assassinated by Kavousifar and his nephew, was responsible for handing out long sentences to many political activists. Moghaddas sometimes even boasted that he sentenced the accused without even reading their files!

Kavoussifar had introduced himself as the killer of Moghaddas to the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi, where he had applied for asylum. The embassy guards handed him over to the Interpol, which informed Islamic Republic’s authorities of the incident.
I thought it was just the Homeland Security at the US airports who were the thickest officials in the world!

Here, Majid Kavousifar is seen smiling and saying his last goodbye. Why are so many victims smiling in these latest round of public executions? Perhaps if there is any after life, it will be better than living under the mullahs.

We all know what the government lawyers will say: he was a known killer, his name was on the Interpol list, we really can’t give asylum to someone who has murdered a judge. All true. And yet he killed a killer and torturer, an instrument of mass repression. When is homicide justifiable?

I’m not sure I know the answer to that one, but I do think we should have taken him in, and if we felt obliged to have him tried, we could have tried him in America, where a jury could have heard the whole story. By turning him over to the mullahs, we validated their death warrant on the poor man.

YOU KNOW, I am certain the Iranians would say the same thing about President Bush as Ledeen said about the dead Iranian judge, that he's "a killer and torturer, an instrument of mass repression. When is homicide justifiable?"

And they'd be right about some of it.

So what would Michael Ledeen say about the Iranians if they granted asylum to, for example, an American Islamist who managed to blow Bush's brains out , then somehow escaped the dragnet, got out of the country and made it to the Iranian Embassy in Venezuela?

WOULD LEDEEN and his neocons cronies understand the mullahs' -- even if they tried the assassin in Iran -- reluctance to "validate" the Americans' "death warrant on the poor man"? Somehow, I think not.

It must be a great thing to be a neoconservative and believe in will and power as the drivers of morality and truth.

"What is truth?" indeed.

Perhaps Ledeen ought to bone up on what St. Thomas More thought about the law . . . and due process. Here's the famous dialogue from A Man for All Seasons:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

IT SEEMS TO ME that neoconservatives in high places have been cutting down a forest of morality and law to get at the devil. And now the devil is turning 'round on us . . . and the winds are starting to blow.