Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi TV reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad last December, was released from prison on September 15 after serving nine months of a one-year sentence. (Throwing a shoe at a person is considered highly disrespectful in Islamic culture.) Immediately hailed as a hero in the Arab, Muslim, and NPR-listening worlds last winter for his act of defiance — he yelled “This is your farewell kiss, you dog!” and “This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!” as he hurled each shoe at Bush — al-Zeidi emerged from prison into a world with a new American president and a decreased U.S. military presence in his home country. Now, in a loosely translated Popdose exclusive, he speaks out about his experience.
When I went into prison last year, I was 29 years old. Now I am 30 years old. I am a man now, and in prison I was the man, as you Americans say. People made T-shirts. A game on the Internet called Sock and Awe was created by people with much time on their hands. (It is fun. Play it. You could waste your life in worse ways.) And the video of me throwing my shoes at President George Bush “went viral,” I was told. My prison guards even threw me a birthday party in January. They gave me bright green shoes with holes on the top side that are called Crocs. It was amusing at first.
Many things can change in a short amount of time, however. The zeitgeist — it has shifted. The world has moved on. My people say to me, “The sectarian violence is not like it was, Muntadhar, and this new American president, unlike the previous one, he has a brain.”
Now there is a very bad crime wave, however, and it is led by the same people who almost pushed Iraq into a civil war. They cannot find jobs, so they kidnap and demand ransoms instead. Learn new skills, gentlemen. Take computer classes. Oh, that is right, I have forgotten — there is no electricity to run the computers! Carry on then, sectarian thugs.
My wife – a (sorta) Jewess who emerged from the film similarly exhilarated, and ready to grab a baseball bat for some impromptu strip-mall justice – recovered her faculties quickly and asked to stop in at Big Box Boox (i.e., Barnes & Noble) to pick up some chick lit. So she went off to fiction and I stopped at the bestseller rack, where I was confronted by an entirely different array of “revenge porn.” The titles included Mark Levin’s “conservative manifesto” 
Whilst reading Jack Feerick’s “How Bad Can It Be” column on Marilyn Manson’s new album, I was struck with an interesting thought. Parents have long feared Manson’s effect on their children, or at least they did when I was in school. Why do we choose to fear that which we have been told to fear?
Even Obama has begun to backslide from the fortitude he displayed during the campaign, when he demanded that the detention regime (like other unconstitutional elements of Bush’s “war on terror”) be brought under the rule of law. Now Obama suggests that, despite the military’s inability to try and convict these detainees – either because the cases were flimsy to begin with, or because even military judges won’t convict a suspect based on evidence obtained via torture – our inhumane treatment has turned them into such monsters that we can’t afford to release them. After all, if we did they might become involved in the types of terrorist activity we can’t pin on them now! So we’re just going to continue holding them, without trial, until such time as … I don’t have a conclusion to that sentence, and apparently neither does the president. He’s also suggested that he’s willing to perpetuate the Bush Administration’s military commissions, continuing their perfect record: They’ve never secured a major conviction, nor have they once withstood a court challenge.
As the hours blissfully speed away toward the end of the Bush administration, assessments of its “legacy” continue to bog down – not over the relative weights of its accomplishments (were there any?), nor over rankings of its disastrous failures, but over an astonishing question that pretty well defines the first decade of the 21st century: Will these criminals ever be punished?