From today’s NY Times, something worrisome and something hopeful.
On the worrisome front:
WASHINGTON, Jan. 7 – The Bush administration on Wednesday reasserted its broad authority to declare American citizens to be enemy combatants, and it suggested that the Supreme Court consider two prominent cases at the same time.
Maybe someone smarter than I can explain to me what wouldn’t work with existing laws on treason.On the hopeful front, Friedman’s latest, which ends with:
We cannot change other societies and cultures on our own. But we also can’t just do nothing in the face of this mounting threat. What we can do is partner with the forces of moderation within these societies to help them fight the war of ideas. Because ultimately this is a struggle within the Arab-Muslim world, and we have to help our allies there, just as we did in World Wars I and II.
This column is the first in a five-part series on how we can do that.
If you’ve read my stuff at all, you’ll know that I’m looking for this answer. I sometimes feel like I’m clutching at straws in doing so, but I’ll deal with that.
I’d keep the military warmed up while we looked, tho.
Right and Right. (no pun intended)
It also seems that Tom is having one of his lucid moments. Hopefully it lasts.
I’m not too worried about the Bush administration asserting its alleged power to detain Americans without Constitutional access to the judicial system, when captured in the US and not in the act of committing a terrorist act. It seems clear to me that SCOTUS will deny them that power, but give them some limited powers. In particular, I believe that SCOTUS will allow a person as described above to be detained as an enemy combatant, but only after he is found by a court to be in that category. It won’t just be an executive decision.
On the other hand, if funding political speach close to an election is not deserving of 1st Amendment protection, our Constitution is pretty much meaningless (or, meaningful only at the whim of SCOTUS), so it’s not necessarily wise to second guess the Court.
Jeff,
I’m glad your’re not worried: “I believe that SCOTUS will allow a person as described above to be detained as an enemy combatant, but only after he is found by a court to be in that category.”
Jose Padilla cannot even see a lawyer, much less appear in court. That is reality today. Whether SCOTUS upholds the Administration’s robust use of executive power remains to be seen. If you want a better round-up of this showdown, read Phil Carter at *Intel Dump*.
Myself, I’m worried and am with AL on this one. Existing treason law (hard to convict, but already exists) covers the traitorous activity of US Citizens. EC precedent in place now only adds to the Executive’s illegal power to put anyone they want to away without any review or recourse.
One word on why treason law isn’t necessarily the answer: Hamdi. Does anyone really believe that a man removed from this country while he was an infant and who hasn’t been back since really owes this country any allegiance? Despite his citizenship, a treason prosecution here would be a gross miscarriage of justice.
Another question: Why does the notion persist that the situations of Hamdi and Padilla are in any way unique? Citizens fighting for the other side were detained without access to civilian courts during the Civil War, and it’s quite likely that some American citizens fought for Germany, Japan and Italy in WWII and were detained as prisoners/combatants. Why is the handling of such persons not the appropriate precedent to follow now?
RG–
Anyone who doesn’t want to owe allegience to the US is free to renounce his citizenship. Not hard, and a wise step if you intend to fight for the Taliban.
After the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled that civilians should not have been interned without trial in places where the court system was functioning. That would not, I think, have included the occupied South or the battlefront, but was aimed at the treatment of Confederate sympathizers in the North.
Now, do you really want to argue, RG, that the War on Terror is a threat to the Nation comparable to the Civil War?
Even though American citizens were captured fighting for the enemy in WW2, they were either treated as prisoners of war (Padilla’s incommunicado condition is most definitely not POW status), or they were brought before military tribunals as spies. That’s the Quirin case.
The Bush Administration claims the right to lock up American citizens anywhere, at any time, incommunicado, without any rights to review or any recourse whatsoever. Imagine if they had done that to the Muslim Chaplain Yee, against whom they brought serious charges of complicity with terrorists that have since been retracted as totally unfounded.
First, I challenge you to distinguish this from the travesty of justice that marks the police state. Can’t be done: it’s the same system. So now, second, just pretend that a Democrat wins a Presidential election. Are you still so keen on these lettres de cachet?
A.L.,
You can do better than that.
Scores of thousands of righteous, god-fearing, American citizens were brutally detained for years upon the orders of a President. Why weren’t they charged with treason?
Answer – they were Confederate prisoners of war. They were detained pending termination of hostilities. American citizens are detained all the time without criminal charges being brought, sometimes without any intent to bring criminal charges. The latter are commonly called “material witnesses”.
Time to reboot.
Detention is not the same as prosecution.
Enemy combatants, lawful and unlawful, are supposed to be detained for the duration of hostilities, with no intent to prosecute the lawful combatants. A President would be so derelict in his duty as to merit impeachment if he didn’t do this.
American citizens who aid America’s enemies through arms are enemy combatants as well as traitors.
As for prosecution, there are lots of different courts, tribunals and whatnot which might have jurisdiction here, and none of that jurisdiction is exclusive. Military tribunals, and some military commissions, have their authority solely from the President’s authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces under Article II of the Constitution.
Military courts-martial, and some military tribunals & commissions, have their authority from Congress under Article I of the Constitution. Courts-martial, as an example, try offenses under a Congressional enactment commonly known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Check out the article by Timothy MacDonnell in the March 2002 issue of Army lawyer for a thorough analysis of the many forms of military commissions and tribunals.
But detention is not prosecution, period.
By Tom’s logic we should simply lock up, indefinitely, anyone we feel like, for any reason. That’s just BS, plain and simple.
Why are these people denied access to the courts? There is only ONE valid reason: The government does not want additional information about their capture to be revealed to the “enemy”, because it may inhibit _further_ progress in that conflict.
Do you believe that the government will sometimes act with ill intent? Ask Captain James Yee about malicious prosecution. You want to put a power to detain (imprison) indefinitely any person, anywhere, in the hands of people who’ve already shown themselves to be abusers of that power?
These are precisely the kinds of issues that the constitution and the supreme court are here to address. The SC needs to find a balance between the executive’s legitimate goals (remove _immediate_ dangers, maintain effective channels of intelligence) and civil rights (due process).
Should James Yee have been “detained”, Tom?
I hate the term “war on terrorism”. Wars come to an end. This conflict NEVER WILL. It will be with all of us the rest of our days. Strangely, though, evil rebellious acts have been a part of human civilization more or less indefinitely. Why do we think that our position in history is so different from what’s come before?
The bomb and other weapons of mass destruction, I suppose, make things somewhat different. A guy in an ancient civilization whose tribe is slaughtered suffers effects that are more or less the same; his world is destroyed.
The most fundamental right we have is that of facing an accuser. The distressing speed with which this principle has been abandoned by pro-aggression “tough guy” citizenry speaks to a basic lack of respect for the rules that keep us civilized.
Those same “tough guys” would cry like babies if it ever happened to _them_, or someone in their families.
p.s. My comments were referring to Tom Holsinger’s comment.
Ross,
Go here:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=4th&navby=case&no=027338P&exact=1
It’s the 4th Circuit opinion in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which the Supreme Court has taken under review. I agree with the 4th Circuit ruling. The government must establish a “colorable claim”, aka prima facie case, that a citizen is an enemy combatant to withstand habeus corpus attack on his detention. And the accused is entitled to counsel for the habeus proceeding.
P.S. to Ross:
Here’s the URL for the Washington Post story on the Supreme Court granting cert. in the Hamdi case:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3587-2004Jan9.html
Tom, Padilla isn’t being treated as a Confederate or any other kind of POW. Even if we were to designate him an unlawful combatant, he is entitled to contest this designation under the Geneva Conventions, and Bush has not allowed this.
Material witnesses are not held incommunicado and have rights to judicial process.
To my eyes, the civilian courts and the various sorts of military tribunals are on one side of a great divide, and the Administration’s insistence on the right to “disappear” anyone they label a terrorist, on their own say-so, and without rights of communication, review, or appeal is on the other. Even your own post agrees detainees are entitled to a habeus hearing with counsel. That puts you at odds with the Administration.
[Aside: isn’t “colorable claim” weaker than a prima facie case? Hell, I’m not a lawyer.]
Andrew,
Yup, colorable claim is a weaker burden than prima facie case, but the latter term is better understood by laymen whose eyes glaze over at judicial opinions.
Padilla is being held as an enemy combatant period, not an unlawful or lawful one. The Geneva Convention has no provision whatever for letting a prisoner challenge a captor’s finding that he is a lawful or unlawful combatant. And Padilla was born a citizen, and apprehended here, so no other country has any claim whatever to jurisdiction in this matter.
Note that I said I agreed with the 4th Circuit opinion in Hamdi, not the government position. The 4th Circuit found for the government in result, but not in reasoning.
The Third Geneva Convention states in part
This agrees with common sense. A designation like lawful combatant has no use if the Bush Administration is legitimately allowed to apply the “unlawful combatant” label unilaterally, without allowing the detainee to contest it.
Incidentally, I believe Hamdi, as a battlefield detainee, can be held as a POW, either as a lawful combatant or as an unlawful combatant if he is allowed to contest that designation. The idea that a detainee arrested on US soil at an airport may be imprisoned indefintely at His Majesty the President’s Pleasure is, however, most repugnant to our system of justice. You would think he is entitled to at least the process accorded the Quirin defendants (and maybe the same death penalty, too).
The real litmus test in all of this of course is if those persons who feel that the Bush Administration should have the authority to “detain” American citizens indefinately without counsel or appearance in court would extend the same priviledge to a Gore Administratio – or worse, a Clinton Administration. Consider your truthful answer to this question and then rethink your support for this Executive.
In the case of these detentions, the Executive Branch has far overstepped its constitutional authority and is violating the fundemental 4th Amendment rights of US citizens (not to mention international conventions of armed conflict to which our nation is a signatory). If there is such a compelling requirement to hold citizens incommunicado, then there should be an underlying legal framework, along with a judicial review, that supports this action. In cases where detention is warranted, the govt should be required to present these circumstances and the accused should have the right to appear with counsel. More than two years into the GWOT(TM) the fact that there is not such a legal framework is a travesty (that can be laid to the steps of both the White House and the recumbent Congress). At last, the SCOTUS is getting involved and I wonder how it will decide? I hope that they will side with our most fundemental written law, the Constitution & Bill of Rights, and find the need to restrict the Executive Branch’s unnecessary and illegal power in this matter.
Andrew,
“competent tribunal” does not mean a tribunal of some power other than that of the captor holding the prisoner. The captor determines what a “competent tribunal” is. That is why there was such a fuss over the US concept of military tribunals. See the Army Lawyer article I cited.
Right now, Massoui (spelling?) excepted, we’re just detaining people, and abiding by the Geneva Convention for those. The government has so far ducked the issue of lawful vs. unlawful combatants.
As for holding people apprehended on U.S. soil indefinitely, check out the following URL on the St. Albans, Vermont, raid by Confederate forces during the Civil War.
http://www.vtlife.com/vtlife/current_issue/au03-blast2.htm
Vermont was not in a known zone of combat, yet it became one on 10/19/1864, just as New York, D.C. and Pennsylvannia did on 9/11/2004. In my legal opinion (the 2nd Circuit disagreed in the Padilla case – the 4th Circuit didn’t rule on the issue in Hamdi), it makes no difference where an American citizen is apprehended as an enemy combatant. Holding otherwise makes the Constitution into a suicide pact.
They get a habeus hearing with counsel if they wish to challenge an Executive branch finding that they are enemy combatants. If they are found to be an enemy combatant in this hearing, they may be detained for the duration of hostilities. Congress determines when the hostilities end, either by joint resolution terminating use of military force (Congress enacted a joint resolution authorizing military force on 9/18/01)or by the Senate alone in ratifying a peace treaty. See 18 USC 4001(a).
I NEVER agree with Andrew’s posts; I think he’s insane. I suspect he thinks the same of me.
BUT…Andrew is exactly right on this one. I suppose if you found a US citizen in a Ryder truck full of explosives, or if you apprehended him committing some act of war on US soil, you would be justified in detaining him as a POW or unlawful combatant. “Disappearing” such an operative might have huge value, as he might provide information to permit the arrest of others before they have a chance to “go to ground,” and if all al-queda learns is that their bomb didn’t go off, they can’t refine their tactics based on lessons learned.
This hypo does not, I think accord with the facts of the Padilla case, which involved a low-level operative involved in preliminary planning, and a very public arrest. There is nothing but the government’s say-so in his case. That may well have value to the war on terror, but it is, unlike 90% of “civil libertarian” complaints, a substantial limit on our liberty. Some sort of judicial review is called for. I personally would be satisfied by closed hearings (for intelligence reasons), so long as their are hearings.
As Andrew correctly recognizes, Hamdi is a different case–but no form of judicial proceeding would free him. So it isn’t clear why we shouldn’t have an underlying legal framework of some kind. It need not be the same as the conventional criminal framework, but we need something beyond Exectuive whims.
Much to chew on here.
In response to Rob Lyman, understand that I have no real sympathy for Hamdi; I merely question the fairness of trying a person in his exact situation for treason, which was the suggested remedy that triggered this discussion. Beyond that, I don’t think there’s a jury in this country that would convict, and have my doubts about whether he’s triable on any other offense. In any event, prosecution is not the point; the point is to deny his services to the enemy.
In response to Andrew Lazurus, the Supreme Court’s post-Civil War ruling that’s on point (Milligan?) is clear on the question of “civilians,” but I said “citizens.” If seccession was illegal (and I think it was; see Farber’s “Lincoln’s Constitution”) everyone in the Confederacy, even Jeff Davis and R.E. Lee, was in legal terms a citizen of the US throughout the conflict. Also, one point at issue here is that the government contends that Hamdi and Padilla are, in essence, foot soldiers, not civilians. Moreover, it’s entirely arguable that the US is a combat zone in this conflict; it is considered so by bin Laden, and to date most of the casualties we’ve incurred have been incurred here (which is why I felt one of the recent appeals court decisions in these cases rang hollow).
Also in answer to Andrew, yes, I view the present conflict as a threat to the nation comparable to the Civil War. More of a threat, actually; drawn out over decades, I think it’s an existential struggle, and bin Laden and his lieutenants have a Carthagenian peace in mind. The stakes were never so high in 1861-65.
Now a question: in December of 1944, during the Ardennes offensive, the German military organized infiltration teams under the leadership of Otto Skorzeny to penetrate the US lines. Team members dressed and tried to pass as Americans. They were generally ineffectual, and 18 were captured. According to the leading historian of the battle, Charles MacDonald, all 18 were shot (“A Time for Trumpets,” p. 226). Unfortunately, MacDonald is silent as to what legal procedures were observed. Does anyone have any information as to what happened in practice (as opposed to what was supposed to happen in theory)? I ask because the example would seem to have some relevance to the issue of our handling of caputured al-Qaida agents.
RG,
My late uncle Virgil was a First Army MP captain during the Battle of the Bulge, and was almost caught up in it as commander of the honor guard for the Duchess of Luxembourg. He told me the drill he was instructed in at the time.
The first priority was limiting the damage by the German commandoes (finding some means others are likely around), and the second was to obtain any useful intelligence. Only when those missions were performed was terminal action to be taken with captured commandoes, and then higher ups had to approve convening of a tribunal of available officers. Everyone knew the tribunals would have one outcome.
There was no formal court, i.e., no one from JAG would participate unless one happened to be available by happenstance, there was no formal prosecutor and certainly no defense advocate. The commanding officer of the group holding the prisoner(s) would designate certain officers (at least three and generally no more than six) who weren’t percipient witnesses to sit on the tribunal and often chair it himself (his choice). The only requirements for the tribunal were that it had to have a presiding officer, the members had to be officers who weren’t witnesses, and they had to keep a written record of the proceedings.
The tribunal’s ranking officer was supposed to question the witnesses, and the other members of the tribunal could too but didn’t have to. The nominal purpose of the questioning was to establish that the accused was not a member of the American forces and was in violation of the rules of war, notably by being an enemy combatant wearing an American uniform. The accused had an opportunity to speak for himself on the charges.
Conviction was a certainty as otherwise the tribunal would not be formed at all. Then the accused would be shot by firing squad.
Uncle Virgil’s detachment wore dress MP uniforms with full rig, including white spats as well as the white helmets and white gloves. They were assigned to the Duchess as her honor guard at an honest to god castle where Virgil as ranking Allied officer was assigned servants.
He got the job due to his sterling service in quelling race riots in France when southern rednecks objected to using the same brothels patronized by black troops. Virgil settled those by creating “separate but equal” brothels and catching up on paperwork in his office while his sergeants adjusted cracker attitudes behind the guardhouse. Our ancestors were Pennsylvannia Dutch Quakers who served as officers of black regiments during the Civil War – one lost an arm in the Crater.
He first learned the Germans were attacking in the Bulge when a Piper Cub flew over the castle and dropped a note plus some crates by parachute. The note said a German armored column was x miles down the road and coming fast, and to defend the castle (it overlooked a road) with some bazookas and rockets in the crates. Uncle Virgil got the Duchess and her family out of the place immediately in some jeeps and prepared to defend the place, only the Germans ran of gas and couldn’t get going again until lots of reinforcements from Patton’s Third Army appeared.
He told me to watch _Castle Keep_ starring Burt Lancaster, but said it was complete fantasy.
1. Rob—actually, I found your posts long ago on gun control persuasive to the extent that I’m convinced we should enforce certain uncontroversial existing laws (e.g. against sales to felons) before considering any new ones. I was really surprised what a lame job we do with that, and I don’t know why. So all that typing wasn’t in vain. To get back to this case: I’m not demanding open hearings and I’m open to the possibility the Padilla appeals court was too generous. These are differences of degree, while the distinction from the literally tyrannical system the Administration proposes is one of kind.
2. Suppose President Liberal proclaimed the right to unilaterally and unreviewably declare any US citizen to be an “enemy sharpshooter” or “unlawful gun user”. While the citizen would not be jailed, he would be required to surrender his guns, could not get new ones, and forfeited all possible rights under the Second Amendment. I suspect certain people on this blog who are trying to defend the much more extreme position that the Executive can deprive citizens of all liberty would, in this case, call for impeachment if not outright insurrection. (Obviously, Rob is not being referred to here.) Not because the structure of my hypo is different (it isn’t!), but because they trust President Bush, and not President Liberal, to use his new unlimited powers wisely. But the genius of the American system is that we have a government of laws and not of men. Concerned American pegs this well.
3. Tom, obviously the Government could stack tribunals. I suppose it it were sufficiently malevolent, it could stack all the civilian courts too. But at least we’d be operating with the benefit of thousands of years of human experience, that justice is more likely to be done when people are allowed to defend themselves, and when the judge is not the very same person who has ordered the detention. I have asked over and over, how may the structure of the Bush Administration’s proposal be distinguished from arbitrary incarceration as practiced by tyrants. I’ve never received an answer. All I get is variations on: “Well, we did something sort of like that before.” The web site on the St. Albans raid says that the Confederate saboteurs escaped back to Canada. We’ll never know what justice they would have faced in the United States, and they most certainly could not claim to be lawful combatants. (Of course, the Third Geneva Convention was still decades away.)
RG I can’t find what sort of trial took place of the infiltrators, but I’ll keep looking. They wouldn’t have had much defense, would they?
I have asked over and over, how may the structure of the Bush Administration’s proposal be distinguished from arbitrary incarceration as practiced by tyrants. I’ve never received an answer.
Um, Andrew, maybe that’s ’cause there isn’t a difference, other than the fact that Bush is a decent guy and Saddam isn’t.
Maybe if fewer people (not you, but others) insisted on comparing Bush to Hitler because of his Nazi-like obsession with tax cuts, or the quasi-Stalinist library-records thing, or whatever the nonsense-de-jour is, then his actual disturbing dictator-like actions would get more serious scrutiny.
Um, Andrew, maybe that’s ’cause there isn’t a difference, other than the fact that Bush is a decent guy and Saddam isn’t.
You left out the smiley.
Tom,
You are wasting your time.
You have hit two “secular-religious” hot bottons for Liberals and libertarian respectively. Liberals cannot stand any legal punishment for anything and most especially if it might involve the death penalty. If it isn’t “rehabilitation” it isn’t legal or fair to them. That is why they cannot tell the difference between detention and imprisonment.
Unlimited detention of American citizens by the American military with military tribunals having limited civil judicial review, a Republican war time president and no U.N. oversight is simply that phobia taken to the “Nth” degree.
Libertarians object to any power of the state over the individual as a matter of faith and unlimited, indefinite, detention by the state’s military punches that button hard.
Uh, Trent, actually it’s this archaic notion that I cling to that says we are a ‘nation of laws’ and that both the greatest and least of us are both subject to and protected by those laws…
I don’t think that’s a particularly liberal, Liberal, libertarian or Libertarian position.
A.L.
A.L.,
Those who persist in equating detention and imprisonment at this point are not reachable by anything anyone here writes. The Hamdi decision URL I posted explains the difference if they care to look.
Tom –
First, I had brainfade – it’s obvious that ‘rule of law’ is a liberal-as-in-Locke standard; doesn’t change the notion that it’s not a Liberal one.
Next, to keep the argument rolling, could you differentiate, both legally and practically (I saw the link above, but summarize for the rest of the group) the differnece between detention and imprisonment?
A.L.
>Uh, Trent, actually it’s this archaic notion
>that I cling to that says we are a ‘nation of
>laws’ and that both the greatest and least of us
>are both subject to and protected by those
>laws…
A.L.,
Just how many times is Tom Holsinger, in his professional opinion as a practicing trials and motions lawyer for the state of California, going to have to chant that that detention is neither imprisonment, nor punishment nor prosecution before you acknowledge it?
Tom has done so at least three times so far.
Let us be clear:
Detention is not imprisonment.
Detention is not punishment.
Detention is not prosecution.
If you and others refuse to speak to those legal definitions as a basis for arguement. Then this has nothing to do with rule of law and everything to do with the feeling and beliefs of those yammering away with disregard for the plain objective facts.
That sure sounds like a theological debate to me.
I was enjoying the delightful surprise A.L. and Rob taking my side so much I took a day off.
I’ll adopt your phrasing, Trent and Tom.
Here is the fundamental question about what our system of justice is to be in the age of terrorism, and you are quibbling about words and supplying charming but utterly irrelevant anecdotes about Confederate freebooters who were never tried or detained on American soil because they escaped.
I quite agree that detention is not prosecution: prosecution is what I would like to see. While detention is not punishment, insofar as Padilla is in prison, his treatment is both detention and imprisonment in the laymen’s sense of the words. Is imprisonment in law a term-of-art that refers only to sentences? Padilla’s detention is also, to put it mildly, unusual in that he is held incommunicado (unlike detainees in general) and on the Administration’s position he has no appeal to the courts (also unlike civilian detainees like material witnesses). You could argue he is being detained as a POW, but there are serious problems. His conditions of detention are not consistent with POW status, including the fact that he has not been permitted to contest any designation as an unlawful combatant as provided by the Geneva Convention. The truth is, the Administration has invented a special heretofore unknown status for Padilla in which he has no rights whatsoever, and the only restraint upon placing any citizen in this status is the good-heartedness and honesty of the President.
In our tradition, rights are not held at the whim of the Government. You are so paralyzed by fear that you wish to replace our splendid Anglo-American system of law, with habeas corpus as one of its foundations, with the lettres de cachet of the despotic Ancien Regime.
And you say we liberals are un-American!
Great posts from both sides on this issue, but what about this??
Does it matter whether citizens/non-citizens are held/detained and the general public is aware of the situation (Padilla, et al) OR are there hundreds or thousands of people that have been “disappeared” into the maws of the US justice system that we are NOT aware of? The second illustartion is clearly more troubling than the first.
In the first case, I am on Tom and Trent’s side. In the latter case, I am on Andrew and A.L’s side. Any comments??
Phil, to date the Hamzi and Padilla cases are sui generis and we know about them. However, this is just an accident of how and where Padilla was taken into custody: Padilla was briefly in the normal justice system until being transferred to a military brig. The Administration argues that its power to label Padilla (and, tomorrow, you and me) an “enemy combatant” and to detain him (and us) without charge, trial, appeal, or access to family and counsel is absolutely unlimited.
The Constitution says plainly that habeas corpus can be suspended only in cases of rebellion and invasion, which do not obtain now, and the Supreme Court decided in 1867 that such suspension could be effected only by Congress, not unilaterally by the Executive Branch. Success for the Bush argument in Padilla (which, I might add, I don’t think will happen) would mark the end of the United States as a truly free country under the rule of law, establishing instead an elected despot whom we would have to hope wouldn’t send too many of us into a legal black hole. History teaches, of course, that adopting an undemocratic structure of government guarantees, sooner rather than later, a totalitarian state.
To give you a sense of how far out Bush’s “audacious” claim is—Karl Rove feels audacity is the sign of leadership and re-election—an opposing amicus brief was filed signed by the extremely conservative (and not classically libertarian) Rutherford Institute. Also in opposition: extreme conservative scholar Viet Dinh (who perpetrated much of the PATRIOT Act).
So far the comments seem to have focused on only the one article in the post and not the other, and have IMO grown circular.
I’d like to concentrate on the Friedman piece, which I, too, found interesting. In helping what Friedman calls our (real) allies in the Arab World, lets label them the progressive-reformist elements in the Arab world, in my opinion the kind of assistance that would be most valuable is of the intangible sort.
This comment grew and grew so I decided to turn it into a post on my blog, which can be found here. I hope folks find it worth reading.
I think what Concerned & Andrew Lazarus are trying to say is that Bush should have prevented 9/11 and rounded up the plotters so that Progressives could put a “Free Atta” bumper-sticker next to their “Free Mumia” stickers.
All I’m saying is that unless you would support the same expansion of legal authority over citizens for a President Clinton, President Gore, or President Dean, then you should be concerned about the current unconsititutional expansion of authority over citizens by President Bush.
What’s good for the goose…
Concerned American