Ground Zero

9/11, Barack Obama, Ground Zero, John McCain, September 11, World Trade Center

At Ground Zero, on September 11, tell us about terrorists’ rights, Senator Obama

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Senators Barack Obama and John McCain are scheduled to attend a forum in New York City this Thursday, September 11. Presumably, they will visit the World Trade Center, speak to the media, and make formal comments in some venue. While Senator Obama is there, I hope he expands upon what Constitutional rights terrorists and combatants — both lawful and unlawful — have when found outside of our nation and its territories. Specifically, does he believe they are protected by the same rights as a common criminal found within the United States concerning self-incrimination, searches, and legal representation? Should they have full rights to discovery during prosecution?

My family will be at Ground Zero that day only to remember and honor those who were murdered by terrorists, on our soil, on 9/11. Yet I invite Senator Obama, while there, to repeat what he said in Michigan yesterday:

“First of all, you don’t even get to read them their rights until you catch ’em,” Obama said here, drawing laughs from 1,500 supporters in a high school gymnasium. “They should spend more time trying to catch Osama bin Laden and we can worry about the next steps later.”

If the plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks are in the government’s sights, Obama went on, they should be targeted and killed.

“My position has always been clear: If you’ve got a terrorist, take him out,” Obama said. “Anybody who was involved in 9/11, take ’em out.”

But Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade, said captured suspects deserve to file writs of habeus corpus.

Calling it “the foundation of Anglo-American law,” he said the principle “says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ And say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.'”

The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, “because we don’t always have the right person.”

“We don’t always catch the right person,” he said. “We may think it’s Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it’s Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.”

Obama turned back to Palin’s comment, although he said he was not sure whether Palin or Rudy Giuliani said it.

“The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It’s because that’s who we are. That’s what we’re protecting,” Obama said, his voice growing louder and the crowd rising to its feet to cheer. “Don’t mock the Constitution. Don’t make fun of it. Don’t suggest that it’s not American to abide by what the founding fathers set up. It’s worked pretty well for over 200 years.”

Perhaps Senator Obama will also point out where in our Constitution it says non-Americans, outside the United States, have the same rights as we have here.

Update, 10:42 AM, September 9, 2008:

An emailer had a few questions of their own for Senator Obama:

Of course, Sarah Palin probably doesn’t think the Constitution applies to foreign terrorists. But notice that he says, if they’re involved in 9/11 “take them out.” You mean, assassinate them before a trial? How do we know “they’re involved in 9/11” unless we give them the full monty? And what about the intelligence we might have gotten if we “take them out” without interrogation?

Ahmadinejad, Ground Zero, Political wind, September 11, Support our troops

Ground Zero Congressman Jerrold Nadler does not support our troops

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Representative Jerrold Nadler’s Congressional district includes the World Trade Center’s Ground Zero from where more than 20,000 body parts of 2,751 heroes and victims of the September 11 attacks were removed. Yet in Avoiding ‘CSI Kandahar’ today, in the National Review Online, Andrew C. McCarthy writes:

‘We don’t have to pass anything,” smirked Jerrold Nadler to Newsweek. “Let the courts deal with it.”

The key House Democrat seems ever ready to lend a terrorist a helping hand. Just ask Susan Rosenberg, the Weather Underground bomber he helped convince Bill Clinton to commute her 60-year sentence. But now it’s our troops — who Democrats are forever saying they “support” — who need a helping hand. So here was Nadler, giving his usual thumbs-down to a Justice Department plea that Congress provide them, and the nation, with something other than the usual empty words.

The plea came on Monday. Attorney General Michael Mukasey gave a major speech at the American Enterprise Institute. It was a thoughtful request that our lawmakers do their job in the wake of last month’s catastrophic Supreme Court ruling that granted alien enemy combatants a constitutional right to habeas corpus (i.e., to civilian federal court review of the military decision to detain them).

Just to add emphasis, here are the first two paragraphs of Newsweek report:

Raising the prospect that Guantánamo Bay inmates might be unleashed onto the streets of American cities, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Wednesday there is an “urgent” need for Congress to enact a new law governing how federal courts handle legal challenges from detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba.

But Mukasey’s plea for quick passage of a significant new counterterrorism measure essentially fell on deaf ears—at least from the Democrats who control Congress. “Zero,” snapped one key lawmaker, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, when asked the likelihood that Congress will rush to pass the kind of law Mukasey and the Bush administration are seeking. “We don’t have to pass anything,” said Nadler, who chairs the House subcommittee that has primary jurisdiction over the issue, in a brief hallway interview with NEWSWEEK. “Let the courts deal with it.”

Okay. Let the courts deal with it but with one caveat: require every Member of Congress (except Nadler) who stands idly by as Districts Courts do their job creating statute to spend their recesses embedded with an infantry platoon currently deployed in Afghanistan. In addition, require that they be (if necessary) dragged kicking and screaming out on every combat patrol. As civilians, they should not be allowed to fight as that would make them unlawful combatants under the Geneva Conventions. Their job would be to provide legal advice to our troops as they try to fight, win, and survive under the new rules of engagement the federal judges are collectively coming up with while Congress stands mute.

Alternately, Congress can do its job by rapidly taking up Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s suggestion and before this coming September 11, pass stand-alone legislation.

As for Jerrold Nadler, for the duration of each Congressional recess, lock him in the same room as the thousands of still unidentified remains taken from Ground Zero and currently stored at the New York Medical Examiners office. Perhaps the chill will stir a memory or two.

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