Friday, August 17, 2007
The Winning Boy's Mojo
Even well spoken, accomplished editors of major papers don't seem to know what it's going to take to win the war Muslim extremists are waging against us. Witness these two editorials today: Jose Padilla's Due Process in the Washington Post and Putting Away Padilla in the New York Daily News. They had this in common.
WaPo: Does the orderly disposition of Mr. Padilla's court case prove that every terrorism prosecution can and should be channeled through U.S. courts? No, although civil libertarians will make that case, there will be genuine enemy combatants who may not belong in civilian courts. But every person held by the government -- U.S. citizen or not -- must have due process to challenge that detention. The presumption must be that U.S. citizens can rely on the federal courts to oversee their prosecutions. And Mr. Padilla's abhorrent disappearance into limbo should come to be remembered as an aberration never to be repeated. (Emphasis added).
NYDN: Given that Padilla is an American citizen, the government was overzealous in denying him for several years the trial to which he was constitutionally entitled. Ultimately, it is good that he had his day in court. He is, it bears saying again, an American citizen. Which assorted other detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere are not. Enemy combatants they are, status-wise. Enemy combatants let them remain. (Emphasis added).
When the al Qaeda terror network sends someone into America to do us harm, the best thing that can happen from our point of view, and the worst thing that can happen from their point of view, is that the operative just disappears (because we secretly captured him). Al Qaeda then has no clue what went wrong. That is a good thing, because we don't want them to have any information with which to learn from their mistakes. For all they know the operative has flipped and is giving our Predator operators the global coordinates of some al Qaeda asset and they have to take steps to abandon or move everything the operative knew about. We help them out to acknowledge his capture. This is just not debatable. Ask anyone who knows what he or she is doing regarding proper anti-terrorism activity.
So if al Qaeda sends another American citizen in to kill us, and there is no reason to think they won't and often, in fact, I hope we have the brass to put him into a solitary cell and mention not a thing about his capture for years and years if not forever. The al Qaeda terrorist is not a criminal--he's a spy and saboteur and should be put before a military tribunal and then executed if convicted (except we don't do that for reasons unknown to me). Grown ups know we are not going to gain a thing by being kinder than we need to be to our enemies. His citizenship, we know from Ex Parte Quirin, doesn't get him into the federal court system if he's a spy and/or saboteur. Sorry to be so harsh, but putting captured spies and saboteurs into secret solitary confinement is what it's going to take to win this thing. Sooner or later, we'll realize this is the way we have to go, and the end of the war will be sooner if we start doing it now.
WaPo: Does the orderly disposition of Mr. Padilla's court case prove that every terrorism prosecution can and should be channeled through U.S. courts? No, although civil libertarians will make that case, there will be genuine enemy combatants who may not belong in civilian courts. But every person held by the government -- U.S. citizen or not -- must have due process to challenge that detention. The presumption must be that U.S. citizens can rely on the federal courts to oversee their prosecutions. And Mr. Padilla's abhorrent disappearance into limbo should come to be remembered as an aberration never to be repeated. (Emphasis added).
NYDN: Given that Padilla is an American citizen, the government was overzealous in denying him for several years the trial to which he was constitutionally entitled. Ultimately, it is good that he had his day in court. He is, it bears saying again, an American citizen. Which assorted other detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere are not. Enemy combatants they are, status-wise. Enemy combatants let them remain. (Emphasis added).
When the al Qaeda terror network sends someone into America to do us harm, the best thing that can happen from our point of view, and the worst thing that can happen from their point of view, is that the operative just disappears (because we secretly captured him). Al Qaeda then has no clue what went wrong. That is a good thing, because we don't want them to have any information with which to learn from their mistakes. For all they know the operative has flipped and is giving our Predator operators the global coordinates of some al Qaeda asset and they have to take steps to abandon or move everything the operative knew about. We help them out to acknowledge his capture. This is just not debatable. Ask anyone who knows what he or she is doing regarding proper anti-terrorism activity.
So if al Qaeda sends another American citizen in to kill us, and there is no reason to think they won't and often, in fact, I hope we have the brass to put him into a solitary cell and mention not a thing about his capture for years and years if not forever. The al Qaeda terrorist is not a criminal--he's a spy and saboteur and should be put before a military tribunal and then executed if convicted (except we don't do that for reasons unknown to me). Grown ups know we are not going to gain a thing by being kinder than we need to be to our enemies. His citizenship, we know from Ex Parte Quirin, doesn't get him into the federal court system if he's a spy and/or saboteur. Sorry to be so harsh, but putting captured spies and saboteurs into secret solitary confinement is what it's going to take to win this thing. Sooner or later, we'll realize this is the way we have to go, and the end of the war will be sooner if we start doing it now.
Labels: Jose Padilla trial; anti-terrorism tactics
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 12:47 PM 
