[Peace-discuss] Antiwar Fervor: A Bipartisan Disease.

Mon Oct 3 09:58:32 CDT 2011

/"...as the Obama administration hastily rushes for the exits in Iraq 
and Afghanistan,
the U.S. will be losing the bases, infrastructure and practice that make 
possible the high tempo of
drone and special-forces operations. The U.S. may be left with no 
opportunities for capture,
and precious few chances to kill."/

[say it ain't true, Linda Lou...]

*
If there ever was to be a real non-Ibsen-esque & bonafide Enema of the 
People,
John Yoo would have to be the prototype incarnate.

This war criminal and /putong/ /wangbadan/ has not only gall and cajones 
but mocking insolent arrogant disrespect and contempt for humanity
to put this dastardly /reductio ad absurdum/ in print, and the WSJ 
printed it, online at least--

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204226204576603114226847494.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

*

 From Gettysburg to Anwar al-Awlaki
American citizens have never been considered immune from lethal force 
when they take up arms against their country.

By JOHN YOO

The United States can cross Anwar al-Awlaki off the al Qaeda roster. The 
Yemeni-American cleric killed by a U.S. drone strike on Friday was 
linked to the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight over 
Detroit in 2009, the shooting spree at Fort Hood in Texas that killed 13 
that same year, and the near-miss car bombing of Times Square in 2010.

Yet, from the howls on the left, you would never know that President 
Barack Obama had won another victory in the war on terror. Even as 
details of the operation leaked out, critics claimed that our government 
had "assassinated" an American citizen without due process.

Showing that antiwar fervor is a bipartisan disease, Rep. Ron Paul (R., 
Texas) immediately went on the offensive. "Al-Awlaki was born here; he 
is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes," 
declared the Republican presidential candidate. "If the American people 
accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice 
of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I 
think it's sad."

Such fevered accusations echo weightier claims from groups like the 
American Civil Liberties Union and the United Nations. Representing 
Awlaki's father, the ACLU sued the Obama administration last year on the 
theory that the Constitution forbids the government from trying to kill 
an American citizen for allegedly joining the enemy. According to the 
ACLU, the United States must arrest Awlaki and bring him home for trial. 
U.N. officials also issued a report last year suggesting that U.S. 
drones violate the human rights of suspected terrorists because of the 
lack of due process.

Last December, however, a federal court in Washington dismissed the 
ACLU's case. It observed that judges had little ability to intervene in 
wartime targeting decisions and that Awlaki always had the option of 
returning home to prove his innocence.

Today's critics wish to return the United States to the pre-9/11 world 
of fighting terrorism only with the criminal justice system. Worse yet, 
they get the rights of a nation at war terribly wrong. Awlaki's killing 
in no way violates the prohibition on assassination, first declared by 
executive order during the Ford administration. As American government 
officials have long concluded, assassination is an act of murder for 
political purposes. Killing Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy is 
assassination. Shooting an enemy soldier in wartime is not. In World War 
II, the United States did not carry out an assassination when it sent 
long-range fighters to shoot down an air transport carrying the Japanese 
admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

American citizens who join the enemy do not enjoy a roving legal 
force-field that immunizes them from military reprisal. President 
Abraham Lincoln confronted this question at the outset of the Civil War.

Under the Ron Paul-ACLU worldview, Lincoln could not order Union troops 
to fire on Confederates without a trial and should have released them 
all from military prison because they remained citizens (a view shared, 
incidentally, by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of Dred Scott v. 
Sandford). What if Union officers could have seized Gens. Robert E. Lee 
and Albert Johnston at the start of the war?

"Unquestionably, if we had seized and held them, the insurgent cause 
would be much weaker," Lincoln wrote. "But no one of them had then 
committed any crime defined in the law" and a court would order them 
released. Instead, Lincoln concluded, the laws of war must allow the 
United States to treat its own citizens as enemies when they take up 
arms in rebellion.

Supreme Court opinions have upheld Lincoln's principle. During World War 
II, the FBI caught eight German saboteurs trying to sneak into the U.S. 
and at least one of them was a citizen. On reviewing their military 
trial and death sentences, the Justices declared: "Citizenship in the 
United States of an enemy belligerent does not relieve him from the 
consequences" (Ex Parte Quirin, 1942). "Citizens who associate 
themselves with the military arm of the enemy government, and with its 
aid, guidance and direction enter this country bent on hostile acts are 
enemy belligerents." A nation at war has the right to kill enemy 
belligerents in war.

The war on terror's unprecedented nature only makes Lincoln's rule even 
more critical. Al Qaeda has no territory, population or conventional 
armed forces. It draws its operatives from any country and trains them 
to covertly infiltrate peaceful societies to launch surprise attacks on 
civilian targets. If the U.S. were to reserve criminal justice rules for 
American terrorists, it would only encourage al Qaeda to recruit 
citizens and ease their path into this country. American al Qaeda 
operatives would be free from targeting, and efforts to stop them---here 
or abroad---would require the whole system of warrants, judges, Miranda 
warnings and lawyers.

Realizing this, the Supreme Court has made clear that the old rules 
would apply even in this new war. In 2004, it upheld the military 
detention of Yaser Hamdi, a Saudi Arabian captured during the 2001 U.S. 
invasion of Afghanistan who had been born in the U.S. "There is no bar 
to this Nation's holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant," 
the Court's plurality agreed. "A citizen, no less than an alien, can be 
part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition 
partners and engaged in an armed conflict against the United States."

Simply because the Obama administration has the legal right to use force 
to kill members of the enemy does not mean it must always pull the 
trigger. It should have good reasons to believe an American has joined 
al Qaeda. Intelligence reasons favor capturing al Qaeda leaders whenever 
possible to gain information. But as the Obama administration hastily 
rushes for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. will be losing 
the bases, infrastructure and practice that make possible the high tempo 
of drone and special-forces operations. The U.S. may be left with no 
opportunities for capture, and precious few chances to kill.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and 
a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was an official in 
the Justice Department from 2001-03, and is co-editor of the recently 
published "Confronting Terror" (Encounter Books).

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