September 11

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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Boumediene v. Bush, Lawfare, September 11, Support our troops, Suspend the Writ, War on Terror

‘Suspend the Writ’ … our troops and old soldiers need to sound off

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Suspend the Writ.

Those are both my words and the title of commentary this morning by Andrew C. McCarthy, the now former federal prosecutor who led the investigation and related prosecutions of the Landmark bomb plotters, as well as of those who conducted the first attack upon the World Trade Center:

For the protection of our troops on the battlefield and the security of all Americans, Congress needs, right now, to take action to reverse Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision granting constitutional habeas-corpus rights to alien enemy combatants.

It’s time to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.
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SOLDIERS CANNOT BE MADE COPS

The questions now press urgently: Are we are serious about achieving victory over our jihadist enemies? Are we serious about safeguarding the lives of our young men and women in uniform? Those lives of our best and bravest have now been seriously jeopardized, and not just by the legal and political pressure to release enemies who should be detained during the fighting — at least 37 of whom are known to have returned to the jihad according to information released by the Pentagon (in his Boumediene dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia put the number at 30).

The Boumediene challenge is even more basic. The justices want to see our enemies as mere defendants, but our soldiers cannot be seen as cops. Police duties — Miranda warnings, evidence collection, forensic analysis, report-writing — are inimical to and cannot safely be performed in combat. Cops and FBI agents carry out these investigative tasks meticulously because they enjoy the relative safety of peacetime America. If those tasks are imposed on our troops in the deadly crossfire of the foreign battlefield, Americans will die.

If you doubt this, just consult any of the many dedicated men and women in law enforcement who, in their earlier years, served in the military during wartime. They will tell you, based on hard experience, that only a panel of elite lawyers — unburdened by the need to explain themselves to voters — could look at a battlefield and see a crime scene.

We plainly need a legal system for detaining enemy combatants, trying war criminals, and conducting intelligence collection for a novel kind of war against a ruthless, non-state enemy that defies convention. Congress should have devised such a system already. But the fact that Congress has been derelict does not mean it is suddenly appropriate for the devising to be done by judges.

READ THE REST.

His is a plea for returning sanity to the debate over what rights to afford the enemy.

Like millions of others, I hung up my uniform before September 11, 2001. While I lost both family and friends that day and will have my say, this is not my private war.

Yet I believe all those who wore a military uniform in the past can provide important perspectives. Even though this is not “our war,” we owe it to all those who carry on in our stead. Let us tell our Nation of what we know and believe.

These troops — all those who have fought this war and who will fight on — know full well of what they speak. We trust them with our lives and liberty; we must not now demand their silence.

I respectfully ask every troop and old soldier to please sound off.