Padilla and Nurnberg

I've been following the Padilla case on SCOTUSBlog, and I can't help but note a parallel which runs into my recurrent fantasy that someday, George W. Bush will be tried for war crimes in the Hague. The "enemy combatant" designation is intended to strip a class of people who would ordinarily be protected by civil or international law of those protections, to wit, their human rights. Back when I read some of the Nurnberg Laws, it seemed as though this was their precise intention: to create a class of people who had no rights, human or otherwise. If the designation of "enemy combatant" is broadened beyond Mr. Padilla and the current Guantanamo prisoners, the parallel becomes even more precise.

The Government is making a case for this designation, a case with which its allies in civil society agree. How can this be debated politely? How can this be debated at all?

Yo, Face! Take some of this narrative structure, fool.

[From notes based on Oakley Hall. And, yes, I know that the cabbage cannon and Colonel Decker were in completely different episodes.]

One of the reasons "set pieces" are called "set pieces" is because of their ability to set up a series of expectations in the reader's mind and then fulfill those expectations, usually unexpected by some party in the book. To use an example from television: the "A-Team" programs from the 1980's, written by Stephen J. Cannell, usually had a scene with a montage of construction, where the A-Team constructed some improbable device -- say, a howitzer that fires cabbages. Invariably, in the culminating scene, the evil Colonel Decker would come riding up the lone
access road in his Jeep and be swiftly pelted with green, leafy cabbages, to the satisfaction and amusement of the audience. (Of course, in the A-Team, nobody ever got wounded from the automatic weapons which were the team's second resort.)