By Daniel Greenfield,
SultanKnish.BlogsSpot.com
Faisal Shahzad,
the Times Square Car Bombing suspect, has been caught and will
predictably enough be routed through all the formal legalities reserved
for Islamic terrorists trying to kill Americans. He will get a criminal
trial, a lawyer and a jail sentence after which he, like so many of his
compatriots will be released to try and kill again. And quite possibly
sooner than anyone might think.
Meanwhile on FOX, Glenn Beck protested the idea of denying a Miranda
Warning to Shahzad because he is a US citizen and "you don't shred the
constitution." Obviously Beck isn't very familiar with the Constitution,
because at no point in time does it mandate a Miranda warning, or compel
civil trials for armed insurgents. Instead Beck has confused the Miranda
Warning, one of the Warren court's judicial innovations with the
Constitution. This is a mistake commonly made by liberals and those who
have not educated themselves regarding what the Constitution actually
says.
The Warren court pursued its radical agenda of judicial
activism by creating an entire spectrum of "rights" based on spurious
readings of the Constitution. Warren's technique was simple enough. He
would take the actual Constitution and reinterpret the text to suit his
political agenda. The actual ruling was not anything that the Framers
had ever intended, and had nothing to do with the actual purpose the
text was meant to serve. It was just a convenient hook to hang his
ruling on.
Take Cruel and Unusual Punishment, which had been
meant to ban all sorts of hideous executions and tortures that had been
practiced in Europe. The Warren court used it to ban the
denaturalization of a army deserter and to rule that imprisoning heroin
addicts is illegal, because their addiction is a sickness, not a crime.
This had nothing to do with the Eight Amendment of the United States
Constitution which was meant to ban certain painful physical
punishments, not to control whether junkies could be taken off the
street or defectors could be deprived of citizenship. Instead it was
used by the court to ban the death penalty for rape, to ban the death
penalty for 17 year old murderers, and temporarily the idea of the death
penalty itself.
The Miranda Warning that Beck insists is in the
Constitution is based on a similarly spurious reading which made the
leap to arguing that questioning a suspect without informing him of his
rights, such as the aforementioned Ernesto Arturo Miranda, a serial
rapist, was the equivalent of denying him those rights. The court's
argument in Miranda was that being taken into custody is so intimidating
that it is essentially a form of compulsory self-incrimination.
For Beck to argue that a failure to Mirandize "shreds the Constitution"
would mean that he seriously believes that the Constitution had been
shredded all along until 1966 when Earl Warren fixed it by adding the
requirement of a Miranda Warning. This is a belief widely held on the
liberal side of the aisle, but I don't think Beck believes that. He is
simply following the widely held liberal indoctrination which treats the
rulings made through Judicial Activism as equivalent to the actual text
of the Constitution.
In his dissent Justice Harlan warned quite
accurately that; "
I believe the decision of the Court represents poor
constitutional law and entails harmful consequences for the country at
large. How serious these consequences may prove to be, only time can
tell" and pointed out that this was not a ruling meant to prevent
abuse, but to protect abusers; "
The new rules are not designed to
guard against police brutality or other unmistakably banned forms of
coercion... Rather, the thrust of the new rules is to negate all
pressures, to reinforce the nervous or ignorant suspect, and ultimately
to discourage any confession at all."
And Harlan pointed out
the risks of treating such a criminal rights agenda as Constitutional. "
To
incorporate this notion into the Constitution requires a strained
reading of history and precedent and a disregard of the very pragmatic
concerns that alone may on occasion justify such strains."
All this applies rather glaringly to terrorists, where the question goes
well beyond mere criminal conviction. The bottom line is that we are at
war. Not with a single serial rapist, but with a fanatical Islamic
ideology that like Communism before it, demands world conquest.
Faisal Shahzad
was
naturalized barely a year ago. Does anyone seriously believe that
before this time he did not hold whatever views impelled him to try and
set off a car bomb in Times Square? Does being an enemy combatant who
took US citizenship under false pretenses entitle him to full immunity?
The Bill of Rights was intended to preserve the rights of
Americans, not of enemy combatants masquerading as something they are
not. An Islamic terrorist has by definition taken a false oath, as he
certainly does not bear "true faith and allegiance" to the United
States. He had no intention of defending it against its enemies. He is
one of its enemies.
During WW2, Nazi Germany sent a number of
saboteurs into the United States, one of whom was a US Citizen. They
were not given Miranda Warnings, obviously. They were not treated with
kid gloves. They were tried by a military tribunal and executed less
than two months after they arrived in the United States. Read that
again. Less than 2 months. If you want to understand why we won WW2 and
are losing the war now, consider the implications of what you just read.
The old United States could take an enemy combatant, arrest him, try
him, run the decision through the Supreme Court, and still execute him
in under two months. We're lucky if we can bring a captured terrorist to
trial after 7 years. At which point we release him on time served and
send him back to fight us again. If we had Osama bin Laden sitting in
the dock right now, if he confessed to every crime and begged for the
death penalty, it would probably still take us at least a decade to
execute him, assuming we could even find a jury that would vote for the
death penalty for him.
And Miranda is one of the reasons why. Not
so much Miranda itself, as the agenda behind it. The agenda that gives
the murderer every form of defense and discretion, and provides none to
his victims. The agenda that rewards evil, but punishes good.
The
fact of the matter is
that it was common practice to treat spies, saboteurs and pirates as
unlawful combatants who were tried by military tribunals and executed at
will, regardless of whether their disguise included US citizenship or
not.
In the case of the WW2 saboteurs, Ex parte Quirin,
the court stated that;
...entry upon our territory [317 U.S. 1, 37] in time of war by enemy
belligerents, including those acting under the direction of the
armed forces of the enemy, for the purpose of destroying property
used or useful in prosecuting the war, is a hostile and war-like
act. It subjects those who participate in it without uniform to the
punishment prescribed by the law of war for unlawful belligerents.
It is without significance that petitioners were not alleged to have
borne conventional weapons or that their proposed hostile acts did
not necessarily contemplate collision with the Armed Forces of the
United States.
Paragraphs 351 and 352 of the Rules of Land
Warfare, already referred to, plainly contemplate that the hostile
acts and purposes for which unlawful belligerents may be punished
are not limited to assaults on the Armed Forces of the United
States. Modern warfare is directed at the destruction of enemy war
supplies and the implements of their production and transportation
quite as much as at the armed forces. Every consideration which
makes the unlawful belligerent punishable is equally applicable
whether his objective is the one or the other. The law of war cannot
rightly treat those agents of enemy armies who enter our territory,
armed with explosives intended for the destruction of war industries
and supplies, as any the less belligerent enemies than are agent
similarly entering for the purpose of destroying fortified places or
our Armed Forces. By passing our boundaries for such purposes
without uniform or other emblem signifying their belligerent status,
or by discarding that means of identification after entry, such
enemies become unlawful belligerents subject to trial and
punishment.
Citizenship in the United States of an enemy
belligerent does not relieve him from the consequences of a
belligerency which is unlawful because in violation of the law of
war.
The only remaining objection to treating Faisal Shahzad as an enemy
combatant is that there is no "declared war" and thus there can be no
enemy combatants. This is a basic fallacy that relies on the fact that
we are not fighting individual nations, but rather an ideology. We have
come as close as possible to declaring war, within that limitation.
Islam is not an enemy state, just as Communism is not an enemy state. It
is a war waged by followers of a global ideology who number in the
hundreds of millions. The language of conventional wars fought by one
nation against another cannot encompass this.
But those who would
condemn the War on Terror as illegitimate because it is not against a
named state, had better be prepared to argue that
the Tripolitan War fought against Muslim pirates without a formal
Declaration of War under Thomas Jefferson, their destruction supported
by George Washington, was equally "Unconstitutional".
Jefferson's push for an international alliance and his eventual
determination to go it alone, arguably made him the first
Neoconservative. The likes of Ron Paul might castigate the Founders as
"Unconstitutional" because they fought the Tripolitan War without a
declaration of war, assaulted the sovereignty of the Pasha of Tripoli,
and didn't read anyone their Miranda Rights, but I don't think anyone
else in their right mind would. And the War on Terror has been more
formally declared
than the Tripolitan War.
Indeed what warmonger neoconservative was it that said; "
Would to
Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind or crush
them into non-existence". Was it Dick Cheney? No, I'm afraid it was
George Washington, who would no doubt be pilloried today for his
genocidal rhetoric in the editorial pages of the modern New York Times
and the op eds of Pat Buchanan on AntiWar.com. But Washington was a man
of peace as well as a man of war, and he understood that there are times
when "war is not of our choice." This is one of those times.
There's something fundamentally wrong when people who should be
conservatives instead start talking like ACLU lawyers. Start believing
that Miranda is a Constitutional right, rather than a bit of judicial
activism legerdemain. Start thinking that we should be fighting the War
on Terror by following the model of the American Bar Association, rather
than that of Washington, Jefferson, FDR and every wartime President
between them.
The Constitution was never intended to serve as a
suicide pact. It was never intended to protect enemies of the United
States under the colors of the flag. Its Bill of Rights protected the
rights of Americans, not the rights of its enemies. Our laws exist in
order to safeguard the rights of Americans. When they are exploited to
aid those who deprive Americans of their lives and liberties, then they
have been undeniably perverted to play a role opposite to that of their
original purpose. The work of the Warren Court is a comprehensive
illustration of laws turned in on themselves. No country can have or
maintain laws inimical to its survival for very long. And a country that
protects its enemies will eventually fall by their sword.