So Prince Bandar bin Sultan is unloading his 56,000-square-foot palace (or is it a palatial bunker?) in Aspen but plans to hang on to his guest mansions. Too bad he's not planning to clear out of town altogether. Then at least we'd be spared any more nauseating tributes to his local generosity.
"Every community should have someone like him," gushed one recipient of the prince's largess in a News article a few years ago. Please note: This comment - and a dozen like it that I've laid my hands on - was post-9/11, after the full exposure of Saudi Arabia's role in exporting an extremist form of Islam throughout the world.
Every community should have someone like Bandar? Only if you believe every community should be the second home to a high-ranking member of a royal family that presides over a repressive despotism - a suave but shadowy figure who purchases goodwill by doling out a tiny fraction of his wealth much as a czar might fling golden coins from his passing carriage.
Yes, Saudi Arabia has taken small steps toward the modern world since 9/11, and in particular since its own brush with a terrorist bombing in 2003. It has even held local elections in which males voted to fill half of the seats on advisory municipal councils (note the word "advisory").
Nevertheless, to appreciate the sort of place that is the 21st century Saudi kingdom, scan the State Department's 2005 International Religious Freedom Report or its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2005. You will discover, for example, that "freedom of religion does not exist," that "all citizens must be Muslims," that the "government enforces a strictly conservative version of Sunni Islam," that "non-Muslim worshippers risk arrest, imprisonment, lashing, deportation, and torture," that "judges may discount the testimony of nonpracticing Muslims or of individuals who do not adhere to the official interpretation of Islam," that "the testimony of one man equals that of two women," that women "were prohibited from driving and were dependent upon men for transportation. Likewise, they must obtain written permission from a male relative or guardian before the authorities allow them to travel abroad," that a high school chemistry teacher who spoke well of Christianity and Judaism was sentenced to 40 months in jail and 750 lashes (later shelved because of international outrage) - and those are just a few highlights.
However Bandar privately might regard such things, the fact remains that for more than 20 years he was the kingdom's chief representative in the United States and is now secretary-general of its National Security Council. At some point a man must be judged by the company he keeps back home, no matter how generous he might be while enjoying our mountain sunshine.
Judgment day
One year after a federal judge smeared top Interior Department officials as bigots with 19th century attitudes toward Indian welfare, an appeals court has done its duty and booted Judge Royce C. Lamberth from a never-ending case involving Indian trust accounts. That case is too important, and has been dragging on for too long (since a lawsuit was filed in 1996), to have an ax-grinding tyrant presiding over it.
Lamberth not only denounced Interior last July as "a dinosaur - the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and Anglocentrism we thought we had left behind." He also issued ruling after ruling in the case that was reversed upon appeal.
Federal judges wield tremendous power in their courtrooms and a few end up developing the habits of bullies. So it is good to know there are limits - that at some point, as the appeals court said in its Lamberth opinion, "reasonable observers could believe that a judicial decision flowed from the judge's animus toward a party rather than from the judge's application of law to fact." That must not be allowed.
Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.
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