"It is a time when bad people have strong urges to let their ends justify their means."
Best of the Web has a link today to a "memorandum of law" filed in Ramsey Clark's lawsuit on behalf of the Camp X-Ray detainees, which includes the sentence above. It is a remarkable document. As BotW points out, it includes extensive quotes (with a footnote and an ibid.) of the Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil," in order to lend support to the view that "our bold, American, war mongering, macho and swaggering government" is a manifestation of evil that, like Lucifer, is "in need of some restraint."
I have no standing to comment on the legal reasoning, but the writing is sub-literate at best, full of misspellings and screwy grammar, the sort of thing that makes you wonder if it might make more sense in the original language from which it was translated. I confess I didn't read much past the introduction ("Shakespeare, a Recipe for Tyranny, and Lucifer in Need of Some Restraint,") but presumably they move on to Nostradamus and the Prieure de Sion a bit later. The author, one Steven Yagman, has apparently forgotten to take his lithium. At any rate, he is a master of the xeroxed-UFO-pamphlet rhetorical style. I've read quite a few of these in my day, but I haven't seen anything this crazy in a long time. It is, as Rand Simberg says "beyond parody." Could it possibly be intended seriously?
I'd write more about this, but I have a strong urge to let my end justify my means...
Posted by Dr. Frank at February 12, 2002 11:16 PM | TrackBack