October 06, 2008
We reap what the Supreme Court sows
Back in June I had this to say about the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Boumediene v. Bush:
It's been a week since the Court issued what may be the single most dangerous, unjustified -- and intellectually dishonest -- decision in the history of the American judiciary, when five justices ruled that unlawful combatants, captured on the battlefield, are entitled not only to more rights than POWs receive under the Geneva Conventions, not only more rights than members of the U.S. military, not only more rights than illegal aliens in the United States, but to the same rights as American citizens.
National Review's Andrew McCarthy notes that the Supreme Court's folly is coming back to haunt us all, as everyone but the Justices -- and the PC crowd -- knew it would.
The Supreme Court [in June] had just decided, in the Boumediene case, to give constitutional habeas corpus rights (i.e., the right to petition the federal civilian courts) to alien enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay; a panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals promptly presumed to reverse the commander-in-chief's determination that the Uighur combatants — ethnic Chinese Muslims who were apprehended training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan — were not enemy combatants.
Now the next shoe is about to drop.
The Washington Post reports that a federal judge in Washington may be about to order the Uighurs released into the United States — i.e., to dwell freely among our population. This is the very nightmare scenario I warned about.
The courts' steps are outrageous, but predictable and inevitable. A lot of the blame here, however, goes to the administration and the military. They have long taken the position that radical Islamic ideology is not the problem, and that we need only worry about actively those taking up arms against the United States. They don't want us to talk about jihad — the better to keep us in the dark about jihadist ideology.
Thus, the government rationalizes, the Uighurs are not a threat to us, only to the Chinese. That was all the daylight the judges need to say: OK, then release them in the U.S., since no other country — except China, where they'd be persecuted — will take them.
The government's self-defeating argument is preposterous. Jihadists — and there is not question that the Uighurs are jihadists — do not recognize distinctions based on the Westphalia world of nation-states. In their view, it is Dar al Islam or Dar al Harb: i.e., you are either part of the realm of the Muslims or the realm of war, and the goal is to turn Dar al Harb into Dar al Islam by any means necessary.
Releasing trained jihadists into the United States on the theory that their beef is with the Chinese and they have no problem with us would be a delusional act of suicide.
But those in favor of trying to wage law, when our enemies are waging war, are clearly delusional -- and suicidal, too. Which is why I am confident that our judicial oligarchs won't hesitate to release these would-be jihadis onto our streets.
Posted by Mike Lief at October 6, 2008 11:53 PM
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