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.
——
If you care to comment, click here or scan down.