"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."
-- Leon Trotsky
One of the more difficult problems we face in these challenging times is that we in the political sphere are often so busy spinning that we're not often enough listening or explaining. Because of that, having listened in on an impassioned and convincing but I think wrongheaded tirade by Sen. Patrick Leahy yesterday I am convinced we simply haven't gotten certain details clear. When this happens in my profession, as it often does, I bring it down to simple, dumb questions.
We do hear a lot about this 'Imperial President' and the toughest questions I've heard from the press corps circle around the unmentionable, which is torture. It's rather astonishing though, how much a great deal of the opposition to the president I think stems from his crushed credibility with them. It doesn't allow them to trust anything he does, and they believe that he's ruining America. He's not. He's forcing us to think about a war nobody wants to think about, and war is the most all-consuming subject humans have. But because the opposition has been so strident, we have arrived at the rhetorical point of 'treason'. Democrats in the House have voted against American military tribunals in favor of international ones. This is the only explanation that makes sense to me, they believe the president to be so misled and having corrupted America and America's credibility abroad that they are ready to punt. I think this is ultimately a self-defeating conviction, but it exists nonetheless. Here's Leahy:
What has changed in the past five years that justifies not merely suspending, but abolishing the writ of habeas corpus for a broad category of people who have not been found guilty or even charged with any crime? What has changed in the last five years that our Government is so inept and our people so terrified that we must do what no bomb or attack could ever do by taking away the very freedoms that define America? Why would we allow the terrorists to win by doing to ourselves what they could never do and abandon the principles for which so many Americans today and through our history have fought and sacrificed? What has happened that the Senate is willing to turn America from a bastion of freedom into a caldron of suspicion ruled by a Government of unchecked power?
Under the Constitution, a suspension of the writ may only be justified during an invasion or a rebellion, when the public safety demands it. Six weeks after the deadliest attack on American soil in our history, the Congress that passed the PATRIOT Act rightly concluded that a suspension of the writ would not be justified. Yet now, six weeks before a mid-term election, the Bush-Cheney Administration and its supplicants here in Congress deem a complete abolition of the writ the highest priority – a priority so urgent that we are allowed no time to properly review, debate and amend a bill we first saw in its current form less that 72 hours ago. Notwithstanding the harm the Administration has done to national security with its mismanaged misadventure in Iraq, there is no new national security crisis. There is only a Republican political crisis. And that, as we all know, is why this un-American, unconstitutional legislation is before us today.
We have a profoundly important and dangerous choice to make today. The danger is not that we adopt a “pre-9/11 mentality.” We adopted a post-9/11 mentality in the PATRIOT Act when we declined to suspend the writ, and we can do so again today. The danger, as Senator Feingold has stated in a different context, is that we adopt a pre-1776 mentality: one that dismisses the Constitution on which our American freedoms are founded. Actually, it is worse than that. Habeas corpus was the most basic protection of freedom that Englishmen secured from their King in the Magna Carta. The mentality adopted by this bill, in abolishing habeas corpus for a broad swath of people, is a pre-1215 mentality.
Every one of us has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution. In order to uphold that oath, I believe we have a duty to vote for this amendment and against this irresponsible and flagrantly unconstitutional bill. That is what I shall do, and I urge all Senators on both sides of the aisle to join me.
What I haven't included is that Leahy believes that the law as written will apply to millions of people who live in America. Hewitt asserts that habeas has never applied to enemy combatants during a time of war.
Patterico asks the question, is there a situation in which torturous interrogation is ever justified? It's a question we used to ask in the blogosphere, in the abstract. But now that the President has actually put his answer in the form of a legislative agenda, the wails have arisen from all sides. The extreme distrust of the Executive Branch from the Democrats gives an answer which sounds like 'never'. What I really believe they mean is that 'we would never do it like this'.
You see if you give Leahy's implications the numbers that make sense, it changes the entire import of his dissent. And I think this is where the question ought to be framed. Because of everything the President has done in the murky area of secret prisons and violations of what was not law before Hamdan, it boils down to the 17 secret prisoners and the combatants at Gitmo whose number is somewhere around 500. And what is the ultimate fate of those half-thousand?
Here's Patterico:
My simple question is this: based on these hypothetical facts, was the waterboarding session worth it?
While this is not being done for retribution, it may provide some perspective to note that, in the hypothetical, the plot stopped by obtaining the information is much like 9/11. And in the real 9/11, real people in the Twin Towers who were confronted with fires and smoke had the sensation they couldn’t breathe, but that’s because they actually couldn’t — and it lasted more than two minutes. Then they were crushed by the collapsed building, and taken away from their families, due to the actions of this man. If we don’t get the information, similar things would happen again, perhaps to hundreds or thousands of people.
So: is such a waterboarding session worth it?
I think those led by Leahy believe that George W. Bush has attempted to change the law in order to convert our government into a killing machine. That his administration has adequately demonstrated themselves to be the embodiment of.. well, evil. That their intent is wreckless and that the collateral damage is inevitable and irreconcilable, and for this lack of confidence they will limit the power available to the US by legal means and defer it to the world. Leahy invokes the cardinal principle of our criminal justice, that it is better to let 100 guilty men go free than it is to punish one innocent man. And in this legislation he fears a terrible inversion.
Defenders of the President, those of us who believe we are truly at war take the opposite tack. We believe that we now face combatants who have demonstrated motive, means and opportunity to make war upon the US by unconventional means. That every one of them who goes free is worse than a serial killer and that the rules of criminal justice should not apply to them. That by definition such combatants are few in number and that this does not cover many millions. We believe that America must arm itself with the necessary weapons, principles and policies to defeat this enemy and that the aims and intent of this president can be trusted.
Leahy makes the mistake of applying criminal justice standards to war, and his mistrust of everything this President stands for in this war serves to weaken America in that war.
Are they criminals or are they soldiers?
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