Appellate Practice
Mar. 26, 2004
In This Country, Nobody Wants to Take the Blame for Anything
Column By Garry Abrams - What do master terrorist Osama bin Laden and the nutritionally sinister cheeseburger have in common? A lot, unfortunately.
By Garry Abrams
What do master terrorist Osama bin Laden and the nutritionally sinister cheeseburger have in common?
A lot, unfortunately.
While terrorism is clearly evil and on an entirely different level than the food fight, both issues have eerie parallels and seem to have brought out the divisive worst in our public life.
For instance, both bin Laden and the cheeseburger have been determined to be killers and threats to national security.
Various politicians have determined at various times that both were beyond the jurisdiction of the legal system.
Most important, nobody in power wants to take the blame for failing to foresee either the bin Laden menace or the emerging fast-food-induced national obesity cataclysm.
Those are the disheartening signals our leaders have been telegraphing in recent days as they wrestled with the threats of terrorism and corpulence.
On both the bin Laden and cheeseburger fronts, politicians and high officials have tossed blame around like mud pies. But none has had the guts to say they were at fault, or at least that they could have done more to stop the inevitable carnage imposed by terrorism and fast food.
In the case of bin Laden, the al-Qaida head was the subject of intense and prolonged debate in the Clinton administration over whether he should be captured and tried with all due process for crimes against the United States - or killed extrajudicially like a roach on a quarter-pounder.
In the end, bin Laden was neither captured nor killed. And the suicide attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., knocked down the Twin Towers and punched a hole in the Pentagon during the Bush administration.
At hearings this week before an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, Secretary of State Colin Powell dismissed Clinton administration efforts against bin Laden as puny.
"We wanted to move beyond the roll-back policy of containment, criminal prosecution and limited retaliation for specific terror attacks," Powell said during testimony Tuesday. "We wanted to destroy al-Qaida."
But former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asserted that the Clinton administration acted decisively by launching a missile strike against bin Laden in 1998 and warning the Taliban government of Afghanistan that it would be held accountable for letting bin Laden use its country as a base.
"There should have been no confusion that our personnel were authorized to kill bin Laden," Albright testified. "We did not, after all, launch cruise missiles for the purpose of serving legal papers."
So, there.
Wednesday's testimony was much the same, with witnesses maintaining, "It's not our fault," or pointing fingers, or saying that killing bin Laden wouldn't have stopped Sept. 11.
The picture that witnesses have presented at this week's hearings is one of confusion, disarray and unpreparedness under both Bush and Clinton in the run-up to the Sept. 11 attacks.
Likewise with the cheeseburger: A clear majority of politicians in Washington, D.C., is not responsible for any harm the sandwich may have done to the body politic.
Voting largely on partisan lines, the august U.S. House of Representatives last week passed, 276-139, the so-called "Cheeseburger Bill" to shield restaurants and food producers from suits by overweight Americans who blame their health problems on fatty foods.
Basically, the House told the American people, "It's your own fault that you are fat and lazy and sick or dying from couch potatoism."
The food shield bill, which needs to be passed by the Senate to become law, is called the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act.
"The judicial system is being used by industrious law firms and plaintiffs' lawyers who sue without repercussion," Ohio Republican Bob Ney said during debate over the bill, according to news accounts.
The outnumbered opponents of the bill said it was like giving a pardon to the food and restaurant industries when obesity is on the brink of leapfrogging smoking to become the leading cause of preventable death.
"This bill says to the restaurant industry and the food industry, 'You don't have any responsibility ... to our kids and the types of products you try to peddle to them,'" Massachusetts Democrat James McGovern said.
In Nevada, legislators this week pondered what to do about their fat constituents.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that initial ideas for battling fat include forbidding elementary schools from selling unhealthy snacks in vending machines and making it possible for more children to walk to school.
The Nevada lawmakers said they would prefer not to draft anti-fat legislation. But they would, if necessary.
Meanwhile, they know who to blame.
Garry Abrams
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