Right Wing Nut House

Pope Benedict tried again today to quiet the storm of controversy that erupted over his remarks about Islam and violence given during a lecture to scientists and theologians last week.

Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that he was “deeply sorry” about the angry reaction to his recent remarks about Islam, which he said came from a text that didn’t reflect his personal opinion.

“These (words) were in fact a quotation from a Medieval text which do not in any way express my personal thought,” Benedict told pilgrims at his summer palace outside Rome.

The pope sparked the controversy when, in a speech to German university professors Tuesday, he cited the words of a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s founder, as “evil and inhuman.”

“At this time I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims,” the pope said Sunday.

The remarks follow a similar statement released yesterday by the Vatican in which the Pope expressed “regret” for remarks made during the lecture and that “some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers.”

Note here that all the Pope did was substitute the word “sorry” for “regret.” He is still speaking of the reaction to the speech while not apologizing directly for the content. He clarified that the words which gave offense were not his own but rather the statements of a 15th century Byzantine ruler.

Will this appease the church burners and potential papal assassins who are currently being allowed to run wild in the streets of the Middle East? If their “outrage” was indeed due to the Pope’s remarks, then it should have a salutary affect on their hurt feelings.

But of course, the violence is not about “outrage” over anything. It is simple blood lust directed against people of another faith. The Imams and other religious leaders who have ratcheted up this violent response to the Pope’s words find it a most convenient device to control their flocks of ignorant, 7th century peasants while extremists with a political agenda seek to use the violence for their own nefarious purposes.

Most disturbing is that once again, so called “moderate” Muslims have jumped aboard the extremist bandwagon and piggybacked their own causes and concerns on top of the those of the mob in order to horn in on the publicity and victimhood occasioned by the Pope’s statement:

In Turkey, however, where the Pope is due to visit in November, the deputy leader of the ruling party said Benedict had “a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the middle ages”. Salih Kapusuz added: “He is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini.”

Representatives of the two million Turks in Germany, where the comments were made, also expressed deep annoyance. The head of the Turkish community, Kenan Kolat, said they were “very dangerous” and liable to misunderstanding.

The next step is for these “moderate” Muslims to solemnly condemn the violence (churches were firebombed all over the West Bank) while piously calling for “dialogue” and “understanding.” And sure enough, the guilt tripping west will meekly obey, taking part in high profile meetings with local Muslim leaders who will chide the west for their “ignorance” and demand special considerations for the Muslim community. The fact that these “considerations” are designed to further isolate Muslims from the rest of western society thus increasing the power and influence of the Muslim leadership is the ultimate goal of these “moderates.”

It’s nothing less than a con game and we should be on to these grifters by now. Unfortunately, the “moderates” know exactly which buttons to push in order to increase their status as victims in the eyes of guilt ridden western liberals while feeding their anti-religious bias against the Pope. Comparing Benedict to Mussolini and Hitler is about as absurd as it gets and yet, the charge resonates with many on the European left who see the conservative Pontiff and the papacy in general as holdovers from a time when religious wars racked the continent. Certainty about right and wrong behavior or who is good and who is evil as expressed by the Pope and the Catholic church smacks of anti-modernism where it is preferred that relativism be substituted for the moral certitudes found emanating from the Vatican.

All of this is irrelevant to the mobs who have obediently turned out to protest words and ideas that are far beyond their comprehension. The subtlety found in the Pope’s lecture regarding reason and violence - with God being pure reason and hence violence being incompatible with his existence - could have been embraced by people of all faiths if they bothered to look at the Pontiff’s words in their totality. But as we have become all too aware recently, trying to explain the violence by positing a cause and effect scenario is useless. It is not any particular causal happenstance that drives the fanatics into the streets and urges them on to burn churches or kill Christians. It is a disease. It is for the sake of violence alone that the mobs act as they do, the rationale being no rationale is necessary.

I can see why the Pope has issued this second, personal statement trying to explain that he meant no offense in his words. I fear however, that he and most other well meaning western leaders fail to grasp the true nature of the extremists who lurk behind the mobs, goading them on in order to achieve ends that have little to do with religion and everything to do with power and influence.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has the horrible news of an Italian nun shot in the back three times and killed by a Somali gunman. The sister was working at the local hospital and was gunned down by what Malkin correctly refers to as “Animals. Cowards. Barbarians.”

The attack came hours after a Somali cleric called for the assassination of the Pope.

And Michelle points out that Benedict did not apologize for the content of his lecture but rather for the reaction to it.

If ever one needed proof of the shallowness and intellectual laziness of the mainstream media, the hysteria they’ve managed to gin up over remarks by the Pope regarding the Islamic faith, taken wildly out of context, serves as a potent reminder of just how sorry is the state of journalistic ethics and integrity in the west.

Reporters and editors have a duty to reveal not only what is said but accurately tell us what is implied - especially when a hot button subject like religion is involved and when the words are uttered by eminent personages such as a Pope or President. By lifting one quote out of context made by Benedict in a long, thoughtful speech on religion and reason, the western media has once again inflamed the passions of intolerant, hypersensitive Muslims and caused even moderate Islamic governments to condemn the Pope and demand an apology lest more radical elements gain politically over what is certainly a non-issue.

Even a cursory reading of Benedict’s speech reveals the Pope to have a passionate and firm belief in tolerance. His elegant thoughts on God and reason have a beauty that transcends any individual faith and speaks to the spiritual in all of us. Not blessed with the towering intellect of his predecessor, Benedict nevertheless lays out a case for a God that, rather than being in conflict with science, in fact defines reason itself. The universe exists as it does because God is perfection. And being perfect, it is impossible for Him to exist in contradictory terms.

The Pope made a strong case that science and faith can exist side by side in the modern world, that there is nothing inherently wrong with exploring the mysteries of the universe because finding answers will ultimately reveal God as pure reason:

The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

This is the essence of the Pope’s address; a call for a new definition of reason that surmounts what he considers to be artificial barriers between science and faith. Truly remarkable in its depth and subtlety, the Pope has come down firmly on the side of tolerance and freedom.

Then why the reference to Islam’s violent history? Why speak at all of the “forced conversions” in the early years of Islam? If the Pope is guilty of anything, it is perhaps in choosing one school of Islamic thought to make his point about the difference between a God who is reason and a God who transcends reason:

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor [of the text where this debate appears], Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

(HT: Quote from the Pope’s speech courtesy of a grad student at a Catholic Seminary in an email to Michelle Malkin)

Juan Cole points out that there are other schools of thought in Islam that are in opposition to this thinking:

The pope says that in Islam, God is so transcendent that he is beyond reason and therefore cannot be expected to act reasonably. He contrasts this conception of God with that of the Gospel of John, where God is the Logos, the Reason inherent in the universe.

But there have been many schools of Islamic theology and philosophy. The Mu’tazilite school maintained exactly what the Pope is saying, that God must act in accordance with reason and the good as humans know them. The Mu’tazilite approach is still popular in Zaidism and in Twelver Shiism of the Iraqi and Iranian sort. The Ash’ari school, in contrast, insisted that God was beyond human reason and therefore could not be judged rationally. (I think the Pope would find that Tertullian and perhaps also John Calvin would be more sympathetic to this view within Christianity than he is).

And Cole points to forced conversions in the history of Christianity as well (some of them on this continent) which undercuts Benedict’s point about violence and reason to some extent.

Cole believes Benedict should get himself some new advisors on Christian-Muslim relations for making what he considers to be an ill-considered point. This is pure sophistry. As are western calls for the Pope to “apologize.” These calls echo those from what Malkin correctly refers to as “The Religion of Perpetual Outrage.” And for the western media to lazily fall into the trap of the professional grievance mongers in the Islamic world who are always ready to work themselves (and their ignorant followers) into a lather over “insults” to Islam only shows how frighteningly naive and truly shallow many in the media are - especially about matters pertaining to faith and religion.

Case in point; the New York Times:

The Vatican issued a statement saying that Benedict meant no offense and in fact desired dialogue. But this is not the first time the pope has fomented discord between Christians and Muslims.

In 2004 when he was still the Vatican’s top theologian, he spoke out against Turkey’s joining the European Union, because Turkey, as a Muslim country was “in permanent contrast to Europe.”

A doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue.

The world listens carefully to the words of any pope. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal.

It is indicative of the politically correct, nonsensical attitude of many in the media that the Times would have found the Pope’s historically accurate statement describing the vast religious, cultural, and political differences between Turkey and the western European nations in NATO a cause for friction between Muslims and Christians. It isn’t that the differences don’t exist mind you. One just doesn’t voice those differences in public. Such statements are considered impolite in the PC world occupied by the Times and other western media outlets and are best left unspoken.

As for the rest, the Pope, after all, is Catholic. And as we’ve discussed here before, it riles the Times and others that the Catholic faith refuses to change its dogmas and canons to reflect the enlightened views of the Times’ editors.

No, the Pope should not apologize. Instead, the MSM should be covering the wildly out of proportion response by militant Islamic nutters who are tearing up the streets in the Middle East and elsewhere to “protest” what they consider to be this insult to their faith.

If only they could get half as worked up over those who murder in Islam’s name, the world would certainly be a much more peaceful place to live.

UPDATE

Malkin also has a gruesome reminder from the internet jihadists about what happens to those who “insult” Islam.

UPDATE II: POPE APOLOGIZES

Ed Morrissey has the latest statement from the Pope where he “is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers.”

This probably won’t satisfy the Islamist nutters rioting in the streets (now that they have the media’s doting attention) but it was perhaps inevitable given the controversey that erupted over the taking of his words out of context.

Also, check out my favorite Catholic’s take on this. The Anchoress echoes some my themes while making this point about the apology:

Now, we read Benedict blunder shows he has failed to master media machine. This is Benedict’s blunder, you see. As if he has any control over how the press presents a story.

Indeed.

The New York Times says of the debate over detainee rights: “It is one of those rare Congressional moments when the policy is as monumental as the politics.”

Indeed. And the fact that the debate is taking place almost solely and exclusively among Republicans and conservatives says volumes about the cynicism and lack of courage on the part of Democrats in both houses of Congress.

Perfectly content with throwing rhetorical bombs on the issue of detainee rights for months, not offering any solutions but rather tossing exaggerated epithets at the President and Republicans, Congressional Democrats are cowering on the sidelines as the most important debate in the War on Terror unfolds on the Hill:

At issue are definitions of what is permissible in trials and interrogations that both sides view as central to the character of the nation, the way the United States is perceived abroad and the rules of the game for what Mr. Bush has said will be a multigenerational battle against Islamic terrorists.

Democrats have so far remained on the sidelines, sidestepping Republican efforts to draw them into a fight over Mr. Bush’s leadership on national security heading toward the midterm election. Democrats are rapt spectators, however, shielded by the stern opposition to the president being expressed by three Republicans with impeccable credentials on military matters: Senators John McCain of Arizona, John W. Warner of Virginia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. The three were joined on Thursday by Colin L. Powell, formerly the secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in challenging the administration’s approach.

If Democrats think they are being clever by not falling into the Republican “trap” of engaging in a debate on this issue, they have outthought themselves once again. All they are doing is being made to appear as weak and vacillating on matters related to the war as Republicans say they are. They are proving to the American people that they are unworthy of ascending to power this November by sitting on their hands while some of the most important issues relating to both our national security and national identity are decided.

What kind of country do we want to be? How much is our view of ourselves tied up in how others see us? Can we still protect ourselves while desiring to be a “good citizen” of the world? Can our Constitution be stretched in order to recognize the rights of those who wish to destroy us? How much power should be granted the Executive during a time of war?

These are not “political” questions in the traditional sense. And I doubt very much whether any nation in history has had such a unique and soulful argument about many of these issues that go to the heart of our sovereignty as well as the core of our Constitutional form of government.

At issue is the law - international and domestic - and how it should apply to prisoners who fall into our hands. On one side is the President and an obedient Congressional leadership who seek to have the broadest possible interpretation of international statutes relating to torture and the incarceration of prisoners. The President wants to give the CIA the authority to use “enhanced” interrogation techniques on high value prisoners while adjudicating the cases of other detainees using the rather blunt judicial instrument of Military Tribunals.

The problem with the former is that those lining up in opposition - notably Senator McCain and Colin Powell - fear that any deviation from a relatively strict interpretation of the Geneva Convention protocols will place captured American military and intelligence personnel in greater danger of being abused (although it is hard to imagine no matter what our policy about interrogations, how much more danger our people would be in if captured by al-Qaeda or a state that supports the terrorists).

As for the latter, the President wants Military Tribunals to be able to withhold evidence of a classified nature from detainees during their judicial proceedings. McCain & Co. want rules of evidence more in keeping with American Constitutional protections.

On this issue, both sides have strong arguments. Given the nature of the war and how it is being fought, oftentimes the only evidence gathered against a prisoner is via other interrogations or informants whose lives would be placed in danger if their identity were revealed. On the other hand, unless a detainee attorney can assess the evidence against his client, it becomes virtually impossible to defend him. And if the purpose of the Tribunal is to establish the guilt or innocence of the prisoner - a process desperately needed given the uncertainty surrounding the circumstances where many detainees at Guantanamo were captured - then one would hope that the more rigorous standards of evidence would be adopted for the proceedings.

The good news is that the President seems willing to compromise:

“The most important job of government is to protect the homeland, and yesterday they advanced an important piece of legislation to do just that,” Bush told reporters. “I’ll continue to work with members of the Congress to get good legislation so we can do our duty.”

The re-interpreting of Geneva Convention protocols against torture has drawn the most fire from McCain and his supporters. What the White House calls a “redefinition” many experts on international law say is an attempt to circumvent the Geneva articles while immunizing American personnel (especially the CIA) from any charges of war crimes. This is extremely shaky legal ground for the Administration and it has apparently not sat well with lawyers at the Pentagon:

Senior judge advocates general had publicly questioned many aspects of the administration’s position, especially any reinterpreting of the Geneva Conventions. The White House and GOP lawmakers seized on what appeared to be a change of heart to say that they now have military lawyers on their side.

But the letter was signed only after an extraordinary round of negotiations Wednesday between the judge advocates and William J. Haynes II, the Defense Department’s general counsel, according to Republican opponents of Bush’s proposal. The military lawyers refused to sign a letter of endorsement. But after hours of cajoling, they assented to write that they “do not object,” according to three Senate GOP sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were divulging private negotiations.

It is likely that this “redefinition” will be altered or even jettisoned in any final version of the bill.

The Republicans certainly had ulterior political motives in bringing this legislation to the fore 6 weeks before a mid term election in order to highlight the Democratic party’s unfitness and irresponsibility on national security issues. But the fact remains that the heartfelt opposition to the President’s proposals by conservatives carries far more weight in this debate than anything the politically motivated Democrats could muster. McCain, Powell, and the rest have proven that they are not only good Americans. They have also proven that they are good Republicans as well. This despite the probability that their opposition to the President will not win Republicans any votes in November nor advance their personal ambitions with core Republican supporters.

It proves to me that there are still people of conscience in the Republican party. In that respect, it may be worth it even if their opposition costs the party control of one or both houses of Congress in November.

UPDATE

James Joyner is in basic agreement (and makes the same comment I did about McCain’s rational regarding torture):

On the merits, I agree with McCain and company, although not necessarily for the reasons they give. It is patently absurd to argue that our terrorist enemies are going to abide by the Geneva Conventions if we do so.

Graham is right that abiding by international law and our living up to our ideals sends the correct message. I’m more skeptical than he is about our ability to persuade Muslims that we’re the good guys, given that their information is filtered through al Jazeera, the mullahs, and others hostile to us. Still, every documented American attrocity fuels the propaganda fire against us with very little offsetting advantage.

McQ at Q & O:

I agree. Now there are certainly appealing arguments to be made on both sides of the issue, but to this point, that’s really not happened. It is indeed refreshing, as Taylor points out, to see a policy discussion happening which isn’t completely driven by politics. It is equally refreshing to see the president go to Congress to discuss the issues.

So for the time being ignore the press characterizations of this being a rebuff for Bush or a rebellion in the Republican ranks. It is something, had Congress been doing its job, which should have been settled long before this. And in this case, better late than never.

Sullivan (Hysterical as always but his heart is in the right place):

The sight of so many Republican senators and one former secretary of state finally standing up against the brutality and dishonor of this president’s military detention policies is a sign of great hope. It turns out there is an opposition in this country - it’s called what’s left of the sane wing of the GOP. Slowly, real conservatives are speaking out loud what they have long said in private. The apparatchiks of the pro-torture blogosphere can vent, but it is hard to demonize the new opposition as “leftist” or “hysterical.”

Andrew seems a little vexed that the President will use the issue as a club to beat the Democrats with. It is moronic to think the President would do otherwise. With the kind of opposition Republicans face - exaggerated and hyperbolic charges like those contained in Sullivan’s post - what does Andrew and the rest of the unhinged opposition think the President and Republicans are going to do? Sit back and let their opponents have an open field? Allow them the luxury of remaining quiet while they spout their nonsensical and unfair rhetoric?

As I point out in the post, Bush is in fact playing politics with the issue - any President of either party would do the same if placed in his position. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the major electoral dynamic that has been with us since Jefferson was elected: The best defense is a good offense.

There are times like today that I feel like a voice in the conservative wilderness, crying out with a futility akin to a lion roaring his challenge to an empty forest. Or perhaps (more aptly) the feeling of being just an innocuous blogger, a small fish in a very large sea whose views neither deserve nor will ever garner a wide audience.

So be it. “Injustice anywhere,” Martin Luther King said, “is a threat to justice everywhere.” If that be the case, then raising my voice to chastise my government, my friends, and my ideological soulmates for the strange, willful blindness to an injustice staring them in the face is more than worth the disapprobation and anger directed my way.

I am speaking of the injustice of our detainee policy, specifically as it relates to the approximately 445 men being held at the Guantanamo Detention Camp. Our government, on more than one occasion, has referred to these prisoners as “enemy combatants captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan.” This is a lie. It simply isn’t true. The Pentagon’s own investigations into the status of these men shows otherwise. The brutal fact is our government is not telling the truth about the detainees at Guantanamo Bay and as a result, a monstrous injustice is being perpetrated in our name.

Are there terrorists being held at Guantanamo? Undoubtedly yes. But the question of justice that should concern us is not necessarily the guilt or innocence of a particular prisoner. What should make us hang our heads in shame and agitate for change is the process by which it is determined which detainees are a genuine threat to the United States and which were innocent bystanders caught up in the confusing aftermath of the War in Afghanistan.

Because despite what our military and government officials have been telling us for years, the majority of prisoners at Guantanamo were not “captured on the battlefield” but rather were handed over to the American authorities in Pakistan and areas of Afghanistan far removed from any of the battlefields of that war:

One thing about these detainees is very clear: Notwithstanding Rumsfeld’s description, the majority of them were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.

Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that’s more than 10 percent of Guantanamo’s entire prison population. The veracity of this prisoner’s accusations is in doubt after a Syrian prisoner, Mohammed al-Tumani, 19, who was arrested in Pakistan, flatly denied to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal that he’d attended the jihadist training camp that the tribunal record said he did.

Tumani’s denial was bolstered by his American “personal representative,” one of the U.S. military officers — not lawyers — who are tasked with helping prisoners navigate the tribunals. Tumani’s enterprising representative looked at the classified evidence against the Syrian youth and found that just one man — the aforementioned accuser — had placed Tumani at the terrorist training camp. And he had placed Tumani there three months before the teenager had even entered Afghanistan.

Any idea you might have that these “Combat Status Review” proceedings are fair, thorough, and speedy is incorrect. The released documents prove otherwise. In fact, these military boards move at a snail’s pace and, as the Pentagon’s own records show, are an evidentiary travesty:

Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence — even the classified evidence — gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It’s based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars.

In their defense, the military denies all of these accusations while making the astonishing claim that there are no innocent men unjustly imprisoned at the facility This interview, conducted by my brother Terry on a June 27th Nightline with Admiral Harry Harris, Commander at Guantanamo shows that either Harris is being disingenuous at best or that he is truly in the dark about how many of his prisoners came to be incarcerated at his facility:

MORAN: So no man who ever came to Guantanamo Bay came there by mistake was innocent?

You know, it’s a recognized principle in international law that belligerents can hold enemy combatants. And we certainly have these folks that we’ve taken off the battlefield that have gone through these processes we just spoke about.

(As an aside, I have rarely been prouder of my brother professionally as he continuously challenged Harris throughout the interview).

At the moment, according to the government’s own count, there are approximately 130 men, some of them clearly innocent, still being held in legal limbo waiting to go home. One of them, Murat Kurnaz, was just released on August 24. His crimes?

Shortly before March 27, 2005, apparently through an administrative slip-up, the evidence against Kurnaz was declassified. Much of the evidence therein was exculpatory, but an unsigned, unsupported memo suggested guilt.

One allegation was that he was traveling to Pakistan with Selcuk Bilgin, who was a suspect in a bombing, possibly the 2003 Istanbul Bombings. It appears that Bilgin did not travel, having been stopped at the airport for an unpaid fine. In any event, no case was made against Bilgin.

According to a December 22, 2005 story by United Press International, a brief stay at a Tablighi Jamaat hostel lead to the decision to capture Kurnaz.

Kurnaz was caught in a legal quagmire where it is clear that because he was not vouchsafed even the minimal rights of a prisoner granted under the Geneva Convention, he was unable to overcome just the suspicion of guilt:

The United States recently responded to pressure from the German government and released detainee Murat Kurnaz from Guantanamo Bay. Although he spent four years in the U.S. prison there, Kurnaz was never charged with a crime, and there are no indications that he was involved in any terrorist-related activity. Had he been afforded his constitutional right to due process upon detention, it is highly likely that this innocent man would not have wasted four years of his life in prison.

How many more Murat Kurnaz’s are there? Does it matter to you that there may be dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in captivity who are no more a threat to the United States than my pet cat Snowball?

It does to me. And the fact that the tribunals set up to adjudicate these men’s cases was inadequate to the task of discovering the truth should outrage every one of us who cares about American justice.

Harris dismisses the various studies done in response to FOIA requests as “incomplete:”

MORAN: One more on this general legal topic. The Combat Status Review Tribunals that you’ve mentioned, they were studied by lawyers. And that study found that the military’s own records show that 55 percent of the detainees here never committed a hostile act against the U.S. or coalition forces. Only 8 percent were found to be, by the military, al Qaeda fighters. And only 5 percent were actually captured by U.S. forces, many of the rest sold into captivity.

So the basis, the underlying premise of that study is based on less than half of the information that was obtained. And if they draw a conclusion from that, I mean, a solid, serious conclusion from that, then I believe that any reasonable person would agree that that’s a faulty conclusion.

Are they “faulty conclusions?” Lawyers for some of the detainees have described most of the evidence as “hearsay” which is admissible in these CSRT’s but would be thrown out of most any court in any free country of the world. This is important because the debate over detainee’s rights is now over not whether they will be given any of the rights you and I take for granted under the Constitution, but which rights will be granted consistent with maintaining the safety and security of the United States while living up to a minimum standard of justice that would reveal the guilt or innocence of prisoners.

This is the delicate balance that Congress is trying to strike as they seek to comply with the recent Supreme Court decision that ruled the present system unconstitutional. Very few (except the usual civil liberties absolutists) are arguing that these men should be tried like any American criminal. What Congress is looking at is some kind of modified Courts Martial proceeding that would grant detainees at least some of the protections guaranteed under the Constitution.

Progress on the bill is slow. Meanwhile, men whose captivity came about as a result of bounties offered by the military, collected by warlords and Northern Alliance commanders and whose “crimes” may entail nothing more than their being Arabs caught in the war zones await vindication:

But the largest single group at Guantanamo Bay today consists of men caught in indiscriminate sweeps for Arabs in Pakistan. Once arrested, these men passed through several captors before being given to the U.S. military. Some of the men say they were arrested after asking for help getting to their embassies; a few say the Pakistanis asked them for bribes to avoid being turned over to America.

Others assert that they were sold for bounties, a charge substantiated in 2004 when Sami Yousafzai, a Newsweek reporter then stringing for ABC’s “20/20,” visited the Pakistani village where five Kuwaiti detainees were captured. The locals remembered the men. They had arrived with a larger group of a hundred refugees a few weeks after Qaeda fighters had passed through. The villagers said they had offered the group shelter and food, but somebody in the village sold out the guests. Pretty soon, bright lights came swooping down from the skies. “Helicopters … were announcing through loud speakers: ‘Where is Arab? Where is Arab?’ And, ‘Please, you get $1,000 for one Arab,’ ” one resident told Yousafzai.

“The one thing we were never clear of was where they came from,” Scheuer said of the Guantanamo detainees. “DOD picked them up somewhere.” When National Journal told Scheuer that the largest group came from Pakistani custody, he chuckled. “Then they were probably people the Pakistanis thought were dangerous to Pakistan,” he said. “We absolutely got the wrong people.”

I realize we are at war. I realize mistakes are often made in war. I realize the necessity of being as sure as humanly possible that anyone released from Guantanamo will do the United States or its citizens no harm. I realize that some of the evidence gathered by the military is of a classified nature and cannot be released to the press or even sometimes to the prisoner and his lawyer. I realize we cannot offer these detainees all the rights guaranteed to American citizens under the Constitution.

I realize all these things. And I am not insensate to the dilemma this issue poses both legally and politically to our policymakers.

But the fact that 4 years after the Guantanamo facility was opened there still may be dozens of innocent men being held in captivity by the United States government is a singular blot on our honor and a stain on the principles we hold dear as a liberty loving free people.

You cannot be unmoved by this issue. You cannot dismiss the evidence as the rantings of leftists or of the enemies of the United States. You cannot chalk it up to MSM bias or to Democrats playing politics. The evidence of our turpitude is convincing and cannot be denied.

This issue must be resolved finally and completely. Congress must get off the mark and pass a detainees rights bill before the election.

To wait any longer only adds to our shame.

Two examples today from different international bodies prove that those in the west who seek the shelter of law to justify both individual actions of self defense and national wars to ward off aggression are better off either groveling before their enemies and begging for mercy or simply committing suicide.

First, via the Claremont Institute, we discover that the UN General Assembly has decided to divorce itself entirely from natural law by taking away an individual’s right of self defense:

Glenn Reynolds alerts us to this U.N. Report which denies that there is such a thing as a right to self-defense in international law.

No international human right of self-defence is expressly set forth in the primary sources of international law: treaties, customary law, or general principles.

The second amendment implications are expertly dealt with by David Hardy:

I think the point is that the Special Rapper wants to class self-defense as something less than a “right” (i.e., as a manner of criminal defense) because if it were recognized as a “right” it would be something governments would be bound to guarantee — and that leads right to Prof. Glenn Harlan Reynold’s argument that a right to arms should be guaranteed as an international right. How could governments “guarantee” such a right (in the sense of doing something more than saying “you can plead this as a defense if prosecuted” — as might be expected the UN document treats “rights” as something more than “the government must leave you alone” — while outlawing the items a person needs to exercise that right? This leads to the anomaly that the report claims that the right to life is a “right,” but the right to keep from having your life taken is not. I suppose it equates to — you have a “right,” however unenforcable, to be protected by government, but not to defend yourself if it fails to do so. As might be expected from the source, the concept of “right” is rather ineptly socialist: rights are what you may ask the government to do for you. (And of course strongly of the legal positivist school: rights are not something that pre-exist government, and any official declaration of them, derived from a deity, morality, or man’s nature. Rather, in this view they are created by the document, or government, that acts to write them down. Created, as opposed to guaranteed).

Hardy nails this execrable piece of illogic to the church door. He points out the fundamental flaw in the direction that international law has been headed these past few years; the denial that there are independent of government a set of “natural laws” that are vitally necessary to the existence of human liberty.

This, of course, has been a foundational belief in American law and American life since the Declaration’s “self evident” truths completed the work of 17th century political philosophers like Hobbes and Locke. And as Samuelson points out in the Claremont post, the UN has divorced itself from this legal philosophy in order to adopt a much more capricious and arbitrary set of guidelines:

As Reynolds notes, David Hardy shows the pretzels of logic, or perhaps of illogic, that the U.N. needs to make in order to reach that conclusion. As he notes, the U.N.’s conception of law is simply positivistic, and hence divorced from nature. In other words, it is arbitrary ideology, not law.

[snip]

Of course, as I have noted before the U.N., has grown to be hostile to the natural rights foundation of the United States by its very nature. At the foundation of the U.N.’s understanding of law is an idea that is irreconcilable with the natural rights foundation of the U.S. Hence the U.N. does not grasp the necessity of a natural right to self-defense, a right of inestimable importance to us, and formidable only to those who would be tyrants.

And speaking of arbitrary ideology, Alan Dershowitz looks at Amnesty International’s report on the recently concluded Israeli-Hizbullah war and rails against its extraordinarily biased conclusions:

In fact, through restraint, Israel was able to minimize the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, despite Hizbullah’s best efforts to embed itself in population centers and to use civilians as human shields. The total number of innocent Muslim civilians killed by Israeli weapons during a month of ferocious defensive warfare was a fraction of the number of innocent Muslims killed by other Muslims during that same period in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Algeria, and other areas of Muslim-on-Muslim civil strife. Yet the deaths caused by Muslims received a fraction of the attention devoted to alleged Israeli “crimes.”

This lack of concern for Muslims by other Muslims - and the lack of focus by so-called human rights organizations on these deaths - is bigotry, pure and simple.

AMNESTY’S EVIDENCE that Israel’s attacks on infrastructure constitute war crimes comes from its own idiosyncratic interpretation of the already-vague word “disproportionate.” Unfortunately for Amnesty, no other country in any sort of armed conflict has ever adopted such a narrow definition of the term. Indeed, among the very first military objectives of most modern wars is precisely what Israel did: to disable portions of the opponent’s electrical grid and communication network, to destroy bridges and roads, and to do whatever else is necessary to interfere with those parts of the civilian infrastructure that supports the military capability of the enemy.

What does the report have to say about the gross violation of international law and the war crimes committed by Hizbullah when they fired 4,000 missiles into Israeli towns and villages with the sole purpose of killing as many civilians as possible:

THE MORE troubling aspect of Amnesty’s report is their inattention to Hizbullah. If Israel is guilty of war crimes for targeting civilian infrastructure, imagine how much greater is Hizbullah’s moral responsibility for targeting civilians! But Amnesty shows little interest in condemning the terrorist organization that started the conflict, indiscriminately killed both Israeli civilians (directly) and Lebanese civilians (by using them as human shields), and has announced its intention to kill Jews worldwide (already having started by blowing up the Jewish Community Center in Argentina.) Apparently Amnesty has no qualms about Hizbullah six-year war of attrition against Israel following Israel’s complete withdrawal from Southern Lebanon.

As has been widely reported, even al-Jazeera expressed surprise at the imbalance in the Amnesty report:

During the four week war Hizbullah fired 3,900 rockets at Israeli towns and cities with the aim of inflicting maximum civilian casualties.

The Israeli government says that 44 Israeli civilians were killed in the bombardments and 1,400 wounded.

AI has not issued a report accusing Hizbullah of war crimes.

In fact, AI specifically notes that they have no evidence that Hizbullah used Lebanese civilians as human shields to protect themselves from retaliatory attacks by the IDF. This blatant lie is only one indication of Amnesty International’s selective bias against Israel and its arbitrary application of international law. In fact, as Dershowitz points out, AI applies the law to the IDF in such a way as to make it impossible for Israel to legally defend itself:

Consider another example: “While the use of civilians to shield a combatant from attack is a war crime, under international humanitarian law such use does not release the opposing party from its obligations towards the protection of the civilian population.”

Well that’s certainly nice sounding. But what does it mean? What would Amnesty suggest a country do in the face of daily rocket attacks launched from civilian populations? Nothing, apparently. The clear implication of Amnesty’s arguments is that the only way Israel could have avoided committing “war crimes” would have been if it had taken only such military action that carried with it no risk to civilian shields - that is, to do absolutely nothing.

For Amnesty, “Israeli war crimes” are synonymous with “any military action whatsoever.”

This points up a philosphy that seems to have taken over Amnesty International as well as other international bodies with regards to the application of the law as it relates to western countries; you are always wrong and third world countries are always right.

Simplistic? Recent UN pronouncements on vital western freedoms like freedom of the press as well as Amnesty International’s recent comparison of Gitmo to the old Soviet Gulags continue a pattern that has been in motion for most of the last quarter century; hostility to western beliefs in freedom as well as a politicization of the law in order to achieve propaganda ends.

By bending over backward to appease third world peoples who suffered under western domination for most of the last 100 years, these international bodies are destroying the foundation of international law by divorcing it from its roots. Those roots are found in western thought about the nature of law and how it relates in the real world to people’s freedom. By substituting arbitrariness for logic and tradition, the UN and groups like AI risk overturning fundamental protections for all people.

This is too high a price to pay in order to pander to third world sensibilities.

Several times since I began this blog, I have pointed out that the unbelievably vicious hate spewed by the left toward President Bush has automatically enabled every nut with a gun in America (and around the world) to believe that assassinating the President would make them a hero.

There is nothing new to this idea as a similar fear was expressed many times during the Clinton Administration. The vitriol directed towards Clinton by the far right made the Secret Service extremely nervous until the day he left office. Indeed, there were two bona fide and thankfully clumsy attempts to harm the President, neither of which placed the Commander in Chief in any danger but underscored the very real nature of the threat.

And the Warren Commission’s deliberations in trying to decide how much blame for the assassination should be given the city of Dallas and the venomous hate directed toward Kennedy in the weeks leading up to his visit on November 22, 1963 were instructive with regards to both Oswald and Ruby’s actions.

This is why our Secret Service takes an incredibly dim view of people who even joke about assassinating the President. Threats to our national leaders by foreign elements is one thing. But home grown nuts who feel justified in murdering the President because the constant exaggerated rhetoric about dictatorships, and Hitler, and making conspiracy theories a mainstream element of politics gives a potential assassin the false belief that there are a lot of people out there who want to see Bush dead.

Is it a “false belief?” I hope so. I really don’t want to believe that there are lefties out there who would wish to see the President killed. Even the Brits who made a movie about what happens in America after the assassination of Bush don’t advocate the killing of the President. The docudrama called Death of a President set to air this fall on British TV appears to be a harsh critique of of American domestic and foreign policy that is dramatized by showing what would happen in the aftermath of Bush’s killing:

Peter Dale, head of More4, which is due to air the film on October 9, said the drama was a “thought-provoking critique” of contemporary US society.

He said: “It’s an extraordinarily gripping and powerful piece of work, a drama constructed like a documentary that looks back at the assassination of George Bush as the starting point for a very gripping detective story.

“It’s a pointed political examination of what the War on Terror did to the American body politic.

“I’m sure that there will be people who will be upset by it but when you watch it you realise what a sophisticated piece of work it is.

“Sophisticated” indeed. And judging by the fact that the author of this piece put the War in Terror in quotation marks earlier in the article - as if there is no such thing except in the fevered imagination of those silly Americans - one can guess what that “examination” of our body politic will find.

I don’t necessarily mind the idea behind the film. It may have been a better idea to wait until Bush was out of office and then doing the film as an alt/history piece rather than a futuristic sci-fi extravaganza. But if the idiot wants to embarrass himself by making such a film (most British filmakers end up embarrassing themselves when trying to make a film about America), let him have at us and be done with it. And although there would be protests aplenty, my curiosity would get the better of me and if the film were released for TV here, I would probably watch it.

But even the British director isn’t saying that killing Bush would be a good thing. No one that I know of has even hinted at something like that nor would they dare make light of such a situation and nobody ever would, would they?

Would they?

The work may or may not be good drama and may or may not make some excellent points about American political culture. I’m just saying I don’t want Bush to be assassinated. Really, truly. Here are the top ten reasons why:

10. Regular television programming would be pre-empted for days, except maybe for the Super Bowl.

9. News coverage of the assassination and state funeral would shine the rosiest light possible on the President’s memory, causing some viewers to think maybe he wasn’t so bad, after all. (In fact, this might be the only way Bush could get his approval numbers over 50 percent again.)

8. Darryl Worley would record a song about it.

7. For the next several months you wouldn’t be able to pass a supermarket tabloid rack without seeing pictures of Bush and Jesus — together forever.

6. You’d have to listen to your wingnut father-in-law rant about it all through Thanksgiving dinner.

5. The Right collectively would become even more paranoid than it is already.

4. For the rest of your life, you’d have to listen to people referring to Bush as a “martyred president.”

3. The assassination would fuel a whole new generation of conspiracy theorists.

2. Bush wouldn’t live long enough to see what historians will write about his presidency.

1. Dick Cheney.

Ms. Maha of Mahablog evidently is in desperate need of attention. Next time, may I suggest you wet your pants? Judging by the infantile attempts at humor above, I daresay you would find the fawning over by adults who wish to change your diaper more in keeping with both your intellectual prowess and emotional maturity.

That said, I am at a loss for words (so of course I’ll continue anyway).

To say that the above is in poor taste is a given. I don’t care where you are on the political spectrum, if you don’t condemn this unbelievable affront to human decency then you should be ashamed of yourself. Maha can say that she doesn’t want Bush to be assassinated until she’s blue in the face but writing what she did goes so far beyond the pale of legitimate political attack that an apology to her readers should be in order.

Except, her readers agree with her. This is one of the first comments:

great post maha! good reasons all — but #1 is especially disturbing

Comment by temperance — August 31, 2006 @ 12:40 pm

Please note that the commenter finds the constitutional ascension of Dick Cheney to the Presidency “disturbing” but not the assassination of Bush itself.

I wonder if Lambchop is going to take Maha to task for this outrageous slander. I wonder if Dave Niewert will write another ponderous post using his extensive lexicon of faux psychobabbling terms to describe the sickness of thought and reason at work here. I wonder if Billmon will grace us with another one of his specialities; incoherent ramblings that will eventually blame “neocons” for Maha’s idiocy. I wonder if TBogg will try and top what Maha did?

Does it matter? Not really. All of the above and the company they keep on the left have long since left rationality behind and have descended into a hellish nightmare of political warfare that brooks no opposition and judges orthodoxy based on the most intellectually narrow and emotionally shallow reasons imaginable. In their world, the death of Bush at the hands of an assassin would not necessarily elicit public celebration but rather more likely, present an occasion for snark such as we see above. They are much too sophisticated to share in the horror that such an event would cause the overwhelming majority of their countrymen.

I would like to believe that someone on the left will leave a comment scolding Maha for her obscenity of a post. But then, I’d like to believe in the tooth fairy except I gave that up long ago.

UPDATE

Malkin has a tour de force roundup of the history of lefty assassination fantasies. I’m going to bookmark that post.

UPDATE II

I am sorry to report that any rumors you may have heard that there was a smidgen of gray matter in Ms. Maha’s brain were not only grossly exaggerated but probably based on the assumption that since her lips move, coherence must emerge from her mouth.

Judge for yourself: (See Update)

Gracious, poor Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House came down with the vapors over my post, above, which I figured even a rightie would recognize as mere silliness. (Some people have no sense of humor.)

I cannot tell you Barbara how silly your post was. In fact, as I pointed out above, I fully realized you were making fun of the idea of Bush being assassinated.

THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT YOU NINCOMPOOP!

Let’s have a little “silliness” about the Holocaust, shall we?

Why did the Auschwitz shower heads have 12 holes? Because Jews have 10 fingers!!

I LOVE THIS! Let’s try some lynching silliness:

Rope. Tree. Maha. Some assembly required. (Gawd, I KILL myself)

For a real knee slapper, let’s get silly about BOTH the Holocaust and Blacks:

What did the cook say to the jewish black dude?
Get in the back of the oven?

How about some illegal immigrant silliness?

Why didnt Mexico send a team to the olympics this year?
Because everyone who can run, jump, or swim is already over here.

I love being silly, don’t you Barbara? And the reason I was being silly about these subjects was to force feed the idea into your miniscule intellect THAT THERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT YOU SIMPLY CANNOT BE “SILLY” ABOUT.”

It has nothing to do with “political correctness.” It has everything to do with simple common decency. And you blew it girl, period.

Shame on you. For shame. Shame.

When the government of a free people is flush with almost two trillion dollars of its citizen’s monies, the very smell of all that largess draws the hucksters, the flim flam men, the fakes and phonies in addition to the virtuous to Washington.

The city is awash with cash money. Cash for campaigns. Cash for lobbying. Cash for fat federal contracts. Cash for government consulting. Cash for consulting with businesses doing business with the government. Cash for showing businesses how to get fat federal contracts in the first place. Cash for the native guides who, like the Himalayan Sherpas assisting climbers of Mount Everest, shepherd the bewildered yokel through the maze of federal regulations and the dizzying array of alphabet soup monikered bureaucracies, all manned by self important little people with an agenda and a fiefdom to protect so that their clients can reach Nirvana; the federal teat.

Like some kind of out of control pyramid scheme, the cash moves up the chain from bottom to top with the most lucrative business going to the small cadre of lobbyists who can grab the brass ring - your very own, personal earmark or tax exemption, or legislatively friendly line hastily written in the dead of night into some innocuous bill worth millions of dollars to your company.

Whose keeping track? A few million here. Several hundred thousand there. Since no one sweats the small stuff, the game continues and it adds up somehow to billions coursing through the cracks in the system opened by greed, apathy, and a cynical belief that no one cares because no one is really paying attention.

And the physical manifestation of this rape and sodomy of the taxpayer is on display in the conspicuous consumption of the inhabitants who live, work, play, and spend their money in the surrounding suburbs of Sodom:

The three most prosperous large counties in the United States are in the Washington suburbs, according to census figures released yesterday, which show that the region has the second-highest income and the least poverty of any major metropolitan area in the country.

Rapidly growing Loudoun County has emerged as the wealthiest jurisdiction in the nation, with its households last year having a median income of more than $98,000. It is followed by Fairfax and Howard counties, with Montgomery County not far behind.

That accumulation of suburban wealth, local economists said, is a side effect of the enormous flow of federal money into the region through contracts for defense and homeland security work in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, coming after the local technology boom of the 1990s. “When you put that together . . . you have a recipe for heightened prosperity,” said Anirban Basu, an economist at a Baltimore consulting firm.

The result is that the Washington area’s households rank second in income only to those in San Jose, eclipsing such well-heeled places as San Francisco and the bedroom suburbs of New York.

Of course, not all of this is the result of ill gotten or undeserved wealth. In fact, I would hope that the overwhelming portion of it was skimmed legitimately from the government. It’s just that it should be very distressing to anyone who loves liberty and its necessary companion of honest government to stand on a hill and look down on this scene feeling absolute horror and frustration at the place that the American government has come to rest in the early 21st century. Viewed from afar, one feels helpless, almost catatonic when contemplating the enormous effort that goes into devising ever more elaborate and inventive ways to separate the taxpayer’s money from government.

Certainly there are necessary and vital expenditures and businesses that cater to government in a variety of ways and serve the nation honorably in that respect. But then there are the shysters, the gimlet eyed lobbyists like Abramoff who, given enough money, can work miracles with politicians and bureaucrats. Those miracles can take the form of tax breaks geared specifically to your industry or even your individual business; earmarks that crowd legislation with unnecessary expenditures; and even re-arranging a few words or sentences in bills that could spell the difference of millions for a wealthy contributor or golfing buddy.

But the Ambramoffs of Washington are unimportant in the larger scheme of things. It’s the Duke Cunninghams with their reach into the bureaucracies where the real moneychangers operate. The discreet call from a hometown Congressman to the government contracts bureaucrat. Perhaps an invite to lunch or dinner. The shuffling of a few papers. And voila! Not quite illegal. Not entirely unethical. But the deed is done and the constituent is served.

They call it “taking care of the home folks.” What the taxpayers would call it if given the chance is unknown.

I am very happy for the people who live in those three counties around Washington that have now been declared 3 of the wealthiest places to live in the United States. And like good little capitalists, the denizens of those counties have recognized opportunity and grabbed for it. The overwhelming majority of them are blameless, only wanting success and to take care of their families the best way they know how.

But who do you blame? The system? Jesus Christ himself may have thrown up his hands in frustration at doing anything about these defilers of the temple of liberty.

Too much money. Too many compromises with ethics. Too much skirting on the edge of legality. Too many with their hands out and too many with their hands in the cookie jar.

Something has got to change. And the depressing thing is, I don’t even know where to begin.

DEMOCRATS DISCUSS THE THREAT OF TERRORISM AGAINST THE UNITED STATES

I remember the good old days when liberals would place the War on Terror in quotation marks as if the “war” only existed as a political ploy to elect George Bush and Republicans. In this universe, talk of terrorism against the United States was a gigantic trick, a distraction that was used to establish King George’s kingdom while surreptitiously savaging our civil liberties and readying the concentration camps for occupation by regime opponents.

There was something comfortable about this idiotic construct. After all, by denying there was a “war” in the first place, one could blithely go along secure in the knowledge if they were right, liberals had a hook they could use to reel in gullible voters on election day. And if they were wrong and al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group struck, they would simply point out that Bush once again failed to protect us despite their opposition to every single measure the government has taken to do so.

Of course, the left would be banking on the media to help the American people forget that they demeaned the very idea of a War on Terror in the first place. In this, they would probably be successful given the general apathy and short attention span of most voters. But no matter. For the left, it’s “heads I win, tails you lose” when it comes to national security posturing.

Now for reasons having to do with their failure to elicit the proper outrage by the voters against the President’s anti-terrorism efforts - the foolish American people actually support the President’s trying to protect them - the left has switched gears and have taken a “Don’t worry…Be happy” approach to the threat of sudden death from fanatical jihadists:

Most of all, though, we should recall that what’s scary about, say, al-Qaeda isn’t the number of people it has killed, or even the number of people it can kill — it’s the number of people it would like to kill. Terrorists armed with liquid explosives are a problem on a par with lightning strikes or peanut allergies. Terrorists armed with a nuclear bomb is a legitimate nightmare.

I don’t know about you but after reading that I feel much better. I mean, leave aside the fact that dead is dead no matter how the depressing event happens. I would certainly feel worse if I went to the hereafter as a result of eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich than if I met my demise as a passenger on a plane that was blown to smithereens by a liquid bomb planted by some Islamonut. I happen to adore my P & B (Skippy Creamy, of course, with gobs of Concord Grape Jelly) and would be loathe to give it up for anything.

Then again, we don’t ban peanut butter from airplanes. Authorities however, take a rather dim view of liquid bombs being brought on board passenger aircraft, correctly deducing that while peanut butter is sticky and could ruin the upholstery of airplane seats, a liquid bomb might do considerably more damage and should therefore be confiscated before boarding.

According to Mr. Yglesias, however, we should be expending the same amount of resources and attention to terrorism as we do on the pressing problem of overdosing on Skippy. Or perhaps on educating golfers about the fact that the 2 million volts of electricity contained in a bolt of lightening is attracted to an upraised metal golf club the same way that Osama might be attracted to Whitney Houston. If saving lives was the only goal in preventing terrorism, the left could have a point, couldn’t they?

Philip Klein:

Furthermore, terrorism is a different type of threat because in addition to the human carnage it leaves behind, it targets symbols of American power and prosperity (such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon). Were we to have a nonchalant attitude toward terrorism because it mathematically presents a lower fatality risk relative to other dangers, it would not only put us at risk for attacks worse than Sept. 11, but it would demonstrate weakness to current and potential adversaries. As the 9/11 Commission reported, Osama Bin Laden was inspired by the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1993. How would our enemies and allies view America today were we to brush aside dastardly attacks on prominent symbols of our financial and military might?

Personally, I prefer nonchalance to all this preparedness crap. That way, no one can accuse you of having an “inordinate fear” of terrorism. I’m sure you’ve heard the latest slings and arrows coming from our liberal friends; conservative “bedwetters” and “chicken littles” who quake in their boots about dying in a terrorist attack - as if there was any chance of that happening. Better to brush off the threat and put on macho airs (Do liberals had anything down there that would give them real courage in the first place?). This impresses females and also has a salutary affect on the left’s facial acne eruptions what with all those hormones being released in response to their primal chest thumping and declarations of fearlessness.

And just in case we haven’t quite gotten the message about terrorism being no more of a bother than allergies and thunderstorms, up steps Ron Bailey in that bastion of reasonableness Reason Magazine:

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

So do these numbers comfort you? If not, that’s a problem. Already, security measures—pervasive ID checkpoints, metal detectors, and phalanxes of security guards—increasingly clot the pathways of our public lives. It’s easy to overreact when an atrocity takes place—to heed those who promise safety if only we will give the authorities the “tools” they want by surrendering to them some of our liberty. As President Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural speech said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself— nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” However, with risks this low there is no reason for us not to continue to live our lives as though terrorism doesn’t matter—because it doesn’t really matter. We ultimately vanquish terrorism when we refuse to be terrorized.

For the record, I stink at math so we’re going to have to take Mr. Bailey’s descent into the statistical wilderness at face value. Besides that, Mr. Bailey actually has a point. There are other things besides terrorism to be afraid of in America - and one of them is Bailey and his ideological ilk.

To say that Mr. Bailey gets first prize for sophistry and jaw dropping idiocy is to let him off too easily. I would first make the request that the next terrorist attack that occurs - and we know that one is coming and will be successful - Bailey, Yglesias, and the entire crew of lefty head cases who are advancing this meme should be forced to pay a visit to the families of the dead and comfort them with their statistics, graphs, and the law of averages. And when queried about why their loved one died, they could always say “Stuff happens.”

I’m sure that will ease their pain and suffering.

But the truly dangerous nature of Mr. Bailey’s (and others) statistical approach to national security lies in its deceptive call for a “return to normalcy.” While I shouldn’t make fun of their obvious sincerity and concern over the government’s aggressive anti-terrorism efforts, the point is that enduring terrorist attacks on a regular basis because we failed do everything possible to prevent them due to the low probability that any one American will die is loony. Not only is it politically unsustainable it is a disheartening effort to cheapen individual human lives. The intellectual gymnastics performed by people who think like this are breathtaking. It turns everything about America that we admire and that others have fought and died for on its head; that the individual is and must be supreme over the state.

For when the state begins to think like Bailey et. al., it becomes easier to treat Americans as an amorphous mass of humanity rather than individuals with rights, privileges, and responsibilities. Their admirable concern for the state’s overreach in its anti-terrorism efforts loses any relevance when one can turn their argument around and say less than .01% of 1% of people’s civil rights have been egregiously violated. Thus, the anti-terror programs that they find objectionable can be justified using their own logic against them.

We are closing in on 5 years at war in this country. We have yet to reach any kind of a national consensus on the liberty vs. security issue, a prerequisite for our survival as a free country and national entity. This argument being made by Bailey, Yglesias, and others is extraordinarily unhelpful in this cause and serves only to undermine our efforts both to protect our selves and our rights.

I kind of liked it better when they didn’t think we were at war at all…

My hometown of Chicago is starting to get quite a reputation for being the laboratory for every loony left idea that’s come down the pike recently. In the late 1980’s, the city followed the lead of Berkley and other enlightened enclaves of the left by making Chicago a nuclear free zone. Presumably, this means that any missiles launched by an enemy at the city will be issued a citation for violating the ordinance if the warheads don’t alter course and blow up some other place, say Madison, Wisconsin.

Then last December, the city became the latest major metropolitan area to ban smoking in restaurants and bars. Now before I hear from the non-smokers who want to take me to task for spreading second hand smoke and thus ruining their health, I would only point to the historic and cultural connections between food, drink, and the nasty weed. Smoking, despite its tarnished reputation, is in fact a social vice, as embedded in the fabric of human interaction as food, alcohol (a more addictive and destructive drug by far) and coffee. And give the food Nazis a few years and they’ll have coffee roasters and growers in their sights.

But a couple of months ago, the City Council decided to give in to the animal rights loonies and ban the sale of Foie Gras in the city’s restaurants. If you’ve never had Foie Gras or don’t know what it is, think liver sausage without the rye bread, dark mustard, and pickle. Made from the livers of geese, its name means “fatty liver” in French. And in order to achieve the best taste and consistency, goose farmers force feed the birds a high fat diet which causes their livers to grow up to 10 times normal size.

Now don’t get me wrong. I feel for the birds just as I feel for the turkeys that are crammed together on turkey farms, never being able to move more than a few feet for their entire lives. And let’s not forget the slaughtering of cattle and pigs, not a pretty sight I’m sure and not very healthy for the animals either.

Animals are bred, raised and slaughtered for the sole purpose of feeding human beings. We grow them as we grow crops like wheat and soy beans. How they meet their end or how they are treated when they are alive should concern us the same way that we should care for any living thing. But animal rights activists look at our food supply in an anthropomorphic way, wishing to ascribe the same moral tenets to food as they do to other humans - sometimes granting the brutes a superior moral frame of reference to people.

This is nuts. It has nothing to do with animals not having “souls” or even the fact that, with very few exceptions, most beasts are not self-aware and thus have a completely different conscious life than humans. It has to do with relative value. A human life - any human life - is more valuable than that of an animal. This self evident construct escapes the animal rights activists whose agitation presupposes no relative difference between man and beast.

But in lobbying for a ban on Foie Gras, the animal rights activists have become quite selective in their pity. In fact, it is pure politics. Foie Gras being an expensive delicacy ostensibly eaten only by the rich, PETA has hit upon an issue that boosts their profile in the activist community, thus assuring an increase in donations while politicians can strut and posture like peacocks in the barnyard, showing off their care and concern for the well being of our feathered friends. And since the delicacy can be passed off as a rich man’s treat, the City Council figured that they could inject a little class warfare into the issue just for good measure.

What they didn’t count on was a revolt by the proletariat against the idea that government should be telling people what moral choices they should or should not be making about what they eat:

Don’t come between foodies and their foie gras.

That was the message sent by Chicago diners who dug into foie gras dishes Monday, on the eve of the city’s ban on foie gras taking effect. High-end restaurants had special foie gras tastings to protest the ban, and even a few down-home sandwich and pizza joints added it to their menus for the occasion.

[snip]

“What’s next?” asked Gadsby, who also hosted an Outlaw Dinner last month at his Noe Restaurant & Bar in Los Angeles, where foie gras will be subject to a statewide ban by 2012. “They’ll outlaw truffles, then lobster, beluga caviar, oysters. There are diners who eat to fill a hunger urge, and there are diners who eat to be dazzled. If you take away the luxury ingredients, how can you dazzle them?”

The Chicago City Council passed the foie gras ban in April, joining California and several European countries that outlawed foie gras alleging animal cruelty.

The “Foie Gras Revolt” has people talking like it’s 1776 rather than 2006:

The ordinance bans only the sale of foie gras, so restaurateurs have speculated that they can get around it by giving away foie gras or serving it at private parties.

Gadsby jokingly wondered whether he could cook with handcuffs on. He said he’d like to hold underground secret foie gras dinners or label foie gras as “duck liver” or “monkfish liver” to sell it.

Meanwhile, various chefs have reported demand for foie gras mushrooming since the ordinance was approved.

Perhaps if we started calling it “Liberty Liver” we could get the anti-Francophiles on our side.

And it’s good to see that there are still some people who take a perfectly practical, all American view of liberty:

Kou Patra and Saurabh Shah, both physicians, attended Gadsby’s dinner on their first day in Chicago after moving from Cleveland. They recently returned from vacationing in France, where they ate foie gras regularly. “I can’t believe we moved to a place where they banned foie gras,” said Patra, 33.

Some Chicagoans are outraged at what they see as a patronizing law, even if they rarely eat foie gras.

“They might as well make a citywide bedtime ordinance,” said bartender David Brown, 29, who feasted on the outlaw ingredients with his wife, Jennifer, at 676. “It’s like banning smoking. If I’m a bartender, I don’t run a health club. We’re adults; we’re allowed to have bad habits.”

This tendency by my hometown City Council to micromanage the behavior and habits of adults is extremely worrisome. It is a harbinger of what may become commonplace in the near future; states and localities taking it upon themselves to shape our diet, eliminating or curtailing foods based not on whether the foodstuffs contain ingredients or additives that are poisonous or will make us sick but rather based on the nebulous and uncertain effect the foods will have on our future health - or, as in the banning of Foie Gras, the effect on animals raised for the sole and exclusive purpose of feeding people.

Travel down that road a bit and you can see the banning of all meat, regardless of how it is grown or managed. This is the goal of PETA of course. And the politicians who voted for this ban and who shamelessly gave in to the activists, should think twice about their surrender the next time they’re enjoying a steak at Harry Carey’s.

In a perfect world, all that would be needed to understand the law would be a heap of common sense and a love of liberty. Indeed, in the early days of the Republic, “the law” was largely considered self evident and that the nuances of a particular statute were interpreted not by highly trained legal minds but rather by judges appointed or elected based on their reputations for fairness and their ability to apply country wisdom to a legal problem.

This was an age when the courts were considered great entertainment, when judges and juries were routinely swayed not by careful legal reasoning but by the powerful oratory and histrionics of up and coming lawyers. Most of our great statesmen in the early decades of our history were lawyers who made their reputations in this manner. When one of these legal superstars was involved in a case, it would draw people from miles around to watch and listen as the barrister would hold forth, delighting the crowd with humor or moving it to tears with pathos.

But for the law to be a civilizing influence, it was perhaps inevitable that these simple, frontier practices would eventually give way to a legal complexity so discombobulating that ordinary people like you and me would be forced to place our trust in writing and interpreting the law into the hands of educated, trained legal high priests whose common sense and wisdom were less important attributes than their ability to obfuscate and confuse the nuances of the law, all the better to bend it to their will.

In short, somewhere along the path to legal enlightenment, cleverness and chicanery replaced intelligence and common sense as prerequisites to being a good lawyer.

I may get an argument from some of my readers who practice law regarding that last statement but I think my point is valid; understanding of the law is now beyond even those who might be considered reasonably intelligent and perceptive. Without the technical expertise in the law vouchsafed those who train for a career as a lawyer, the rest of us are at sea when it comes to the great legal issues of the day.

I say this only in defense of what follows. In a case that involves the very essence of our constitutional system of government, only a relative handful of the 300 million citizens of this country have the specialized knowledge to examine and debate the issues raised in Judge Taylor’s decision on the legality and constitutionality of the NSA terrorist surveillance program.

This won’t stop the rest of us from forming an opinion on the matter. But that opinion will be based largely on what other, more informed sources have instructed us to think. And in the court of public opinion, like the lawyers of our early history, emotionalism and sensationalism seem to sway our opinion more than common sense and reason.

I say this realizing that I am as susceptible to this kind of argumentation as the next fellow. But in recognizing my limitations, I feel confident that I can nevertheless offer up some observations on Judge Taylor’s opinion that are as valid as anyone elses - lawyers included.

I have had reservations about the legality and efficacy of this program from the beginning. I still do. Leaning once again on authority, there are many people whose opinion I value that have said this program is unconstitutional just as there are those I consider equally knowledgeable believing the program both legal and constitutional.

But then there are those - Eugene Volokh and Orrin Kerr to name two - who aren’t sure. The reason sounds plausible; not all of the details (technical or otherwise) about how the program actually works have been made public. The Washington Post brought this out in their editorial yesterday:

The NSA’s program, about which many facts are still undisclosed, exists at the nexus of inherent presidential powers, laws purporting to constrict those powers, the constitutional right of the people to be free from unreasonable surveillance, and a broad congressional authorization to use force against al-Qaeda. That authorization, the administration argues, permits the wiretapping notwithstanding existing federal surveillance law; inherent presidential powers, it suggests, allow it to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance on its own authority. You don’t have to accept either contention to acknowledge that these are complicated, difficult issues. Judge Taylor devotes a scant few pages to dismissing them, without even discussing key precedents.

Readers of this site know that I have taken a rather jaundiced view of the Bush Administration’s stretching of the constitution using the “inherent powers” argument on secret programs of which we know little or next to nothing. It makes me uncomfortable even though I realize the necessity for the secrecy that must be maintained if these surveillance programs are to be effective. I was especially confused by the tortured reasoning used by the Attorney General in citing the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against al-Qaeda as a justification for what any objective observer would have to conclude is a broad based and troubling expansion of federal surveillance practices. It didn’t ring true then and it doesn’t now.

Having said that, I find it equally mystifying that so many on the left - including the probable next Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers - have already charged, tried, and convicted the President for engaging in surveillance practices whose exact outlines we can only guess at and with absolutely no evidence that the program has been used injudiciously. From what we know about oversight, it has not only been reviewed periodically by the Justice Department (causing alterations in the program to satisfy some of the attorneys there) but the NSA has apparently put strict procedures in place that are designed to prevent the kind of abuse so worrisome to all of us.

Is it enough? Who knows. Certainly not Lamchop and his hysterically unbalanced, unyielding, absolutist opposition to anything this President has done to decrease the likelihood of another 9/11. This goes for the rest of the cockamamie left whose hatred for Bush, the Republicans, and conservatives along with a lusting for power that would be unseemly in another, less forgiving age has poisoned their reason and clouded their judgement to the point that they question the very basis for the increased surveillance; that we are at war with fanatical jihadists.

In this context, it is easy for them to dismiss anything and everything the government does to protect us. Indeed, in their feverish desire to kill the Bush presidency, they have undermined the war effort, giving tremendous aid and comfort to people who want to kill us all. Whether this is deliberate or not is beside the point. It is the logical outgrowth of their hatred.

Does this mean the legality and constitutionality of these programs shouldn’t be questioned? Of course not. All Americans should welcome a discussion between opposing viewpoints on these critical issues. But having a civil, reasoned debate about the lines that must be drawn between expansive civil liberties and terrorist surveillance as the Washington Post is calling for is falling upon deaf ears on the left. Instead, hysteria, paranoia, and a shameless emotional exhibitionism rules the day.

I have said repeatedly that in order to win the War on Terror, we must find a way to engage the left in a dialogue that will bring both sides closer together so that some kind of unity of purpose can be achieved. Simply put, we will lose this war if we remain divided as we are. And as I’ve speculated recently, perhaps it will take a liberal President to make that happen. The pain and angst demonstrated by the Democratic left in being out of power is so profound as to border on psychosis. Hence, they will only listen to one of their own when he/she is sitting in the big chair and faces the awesome responsibilities of the office as well as the frightening truth about the nature of our enemies.

Perhaps then we won’t be seeing the “War on Terror” in quotation marks quite as often and the constant questioning of motives when some horrific plot is uncovered as it was last week in Great Britain. The breathtakingly stupid response of many on the left in this country to that near miss (they found “martyr videos” from some of the suspects which would indicate what a very near thing this plot was to unfolding) shows a continuing lack of seriousness on the part of liberals toward our safety and a sublime ignorance of the nature of our enemies.

Judge Taylor’s decision on the legality of the NSA terrorist surveillance program read more like a press release from a candidate for public office than a legal opinion. This seems to be an almost universal take on Taylor’s writings. Even Lambchop agrees:

Yes, sure, it is true that the judicial opinion issued yesterday is very weak, in places borderline incoherent, in its reasoning with regard to some issues. Anyone can see that. Most everyone who commented on it, including me, pointed that out. But that does not undermine in any way the fact that this President has been systematically breaking the law for no reason other than he thinks that he can, and that judge’s rejection of that belief is quite eloquent and powerful. Most importantly of all, it is indisputably correct.

How we get from “incoherent” to “eloquent” in the space of two sentences only someone with the brains of a sock puppet can say. But it isn’t just the weak arguments and torturous language that jump out at one when reading the decision. It is the same familiar language used by leftist netnuts to describe the Bush Presidency that makes Taylor’s reasoning - or lack thereof - so eerie. It actually made me giggle a little when I realized that the pejoratives she hurled against the President had actually appeared on Lamchop’s website on numerous occasions. Chiding the President for acting like a “king,” is straight from Lamchop’s (and most of the left’s) list of Bush bashing ad hominems.

Is Taylor’s decision, despite its problems, the right one? It doesn’t appear to me that she knows any more about the way that the NSA program works than I do. Perhaps she was privy to information not available to the general public. If so, she doesn’t make that clear. And if she has no more knowledge of how the program works than the rest of us, how can her decision have any merit? It is one thing for sock puppets and other bloggers to state flatly that the program is illegal and unconstitutional. They are, after all, internet pundits and their opinions do not have the force of law. But when a federal judge, armed with exactly the same information that I or Lambchop has, writes an opinion that is in its surety a very serious indictment of lawbreaking by a sitting President, one can legitimately question other motivations that moved Taylor to come down on the side of the issue that she did.

In short, the revelations about Taylor’s past made by many righty bloggers are perfectly legitimate points of discussion considering all the factors at work in her issuing this opinion. And in that respect, Judge Taylor appears small minded, partisan, and eager for publicity - all points that call into question her ultimate judgement and the impartiality of her thinking that led to the decision in the first place.

No, I’m not a lawyer. But I’m not brain dead either. Nor am I insensible to the role that politics plays in our judiciary. But all things considered, Judge Taylor’s headline grabbing decision on the legality of the NSA terrorist surveillance program is not helpful to the kind of ongoing debate we must have on the nature and extent of civil liberties in war time. Bush may not be king. But he is Commander in Chief. And in that role, the President must be given expanded powers when America’s citizens are at risk. Does this mean that the NSA program is legitimate and legal?

I just don’t know. I guess it depends ultimately on whether or not you trust the President not to abuse the enormous power he has, even without this particular program. I wish it weren’t so. I wish everything could be revealed, all decisions about how to best to protect ourselves made in the light of day, all logic and reasoning used to encroach upon our civil liberties made public. But by the ultimate necessity of winning the war, such will not be the case.

The rationalists in this country recognize this. The hysterics do not. And therein may lie the difference between victory and death.

UPDATE

Hugh Hewitt:

Not a single Democrat of any stature or visibility has stepped forward to criticize much less reject the opinion from Judge Anna Diggs Taylor declaring NSA surveillance of our enemies contacting their operatives inside our country to be unconstitutional. Their collective silence has grown more and more revealing as the chorus of legal commentary mocking the absurd opinion has grown throughout the day.

The Democrats cannot be seen to say anything against the opinion because of Kosputin and his minions. The party of Lamont is unhinged, and Judge Taylor’s opinion is now a new icon of the movement.

In fact, the Dems have been mostly silent on this program since it was revealed by the NY Times last December. Given the fact that the President, under the requirement of law, notified the intelligence committees of Congress of this program and that even Dems on those committees have mostly kept their mouths shut, one wonders that if those who know more about this program than Judge Taylor or Lambchop aren’t saying it’s illegal and unconstitutional, how we do we square this with Taylor’s decision?

Strange indeed.