A recent court decision by the United States Court of Appeals in Manhattan offers an unwitting primer on the limits our political system places on the halls of justice. This has very real consequences in the government's prosecution of the War that Won't End in Iraq.

In 2003, before the U.S. invaded Iraq, peace activists in this country wanted to serve as human shields to highlight to horrors of war and maybe raise some consciousness. The Iraq war is unique in that many people predicted even before it started that it would be a disaster. They were right. At the time, many "patriotic" Americans condemned the human shields. But today we realize that these people could have saved hundreds of thousands of Iraqis from death and even a few Americans who have returned home in body bags.

One of those human shields was Judith Karpova, who comes from my neck of the woods in upstate New York. When President Ding-Dong was manipulating the evidence to make his case for war and the Military-Industrial-Complex was gearing up for more blood and guts, the government found out about Karpova's plans to go to Iraq and snagged her. The problem was that in 1990, when Saddam Hussein was first placed on the American shit list for invading Kuwait, the first Bush administration declared that no one from this country can have anything to do with Iraq. That includes traveling there and doing business there. Karpova had entirely peaceful intentions: bearing witness to the devastation that the U.S. bombing would create, covering the war for the Jersey Journal and also deterring American armed forces from destroying civilian infrastructure by strategically positioning herself to prevent our government from bombing those sites.

Good intentions notwithstanding, Karpova was fined $6,700 for violating U.S. law in traveling to Iraq. She hired a lawyer and appealed the fine. The Court of Appeals a few days ago upheld the fine. What stood out for me was how the judges rejected Karpova's argument that the President had no basis to declare that Iraq posed a national security threat to the United States in 2003 and that therefore the government had no authority to levy economic sanctions against her. The Court noted that the President was acting pursuant to authorization from Congress in managing American foreign policy and that the courts will not second-guess these policy judgments.

As a matter of law, it is true that Congress and the President dictate American foreign policy. But for the court in 2007 to dryly note that President Bush in 2003 was authorized to declare that Iraq was an "urgent threat" to our existance is preposterous. Welcome to Theatre of the Absurd. All but the 30 percent in this country who would still follow Bush into the Kool-Aid fountain would agree that the urgent threat was no threat at all, as we cut through the Iraqi army like hot butter and every single independent inquiry into Iraq has proven that Saddam's only weapons were a slingshot and a cap gun. We also know that Bush and Co. cherry picked the evidence to present a worst-case scenario for Iraq. But the Courts cannot put this reality into its decisionmaking, so Karpova is stuck paying the fine. And that, my friends, is American justice in a nutshell.