How Else Not To Fight Terrorism

On December 11, Michigan’s Democratic Senator-for-Life, Carl Levin, released yet one more report styled an “Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.”

Last Friday’s Detroit News summarized it as follows:

Officials at the top of the Bush administration bear the blame for use of interrogation tactics on military detainees that were designed to help U.S. troops endure torture at enemy hands, says a report released Thursday by a Senate panel chaired by Sen. Carl Levin.

The report, the product of a two-year investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, means the Obama administration “needs to look for ways in which people can be held accountable for their actions,’ Levin said in an interview Thursday.

(“Report pins detainee abuse on Rumsfeld”).

When Levin calls on the incoming administration to work for “ways in which people can be held accountable,” he means people like U.S. military interrogators, intelligence officers, and political officials charged with protecting the American people. That jihadist detainees may face consequences for their efforts, some of them successful, to kill us is completely absent from the analysis.

Read the News article, or Levin’s report, and you’ll never known that the captured jihadists, whom he refers to only as “detainees in U.S. custody,” are anything more than victims of American civil-rights violations. For all we can learn from Levin’s 19-page lecture, we don’t know why or how these men became “detainees in U.S. custody,” or if they share any more culpability in their situation than orphans trapped in a corrupt and inefficient foster-care system.

For example, here is how Levin’s Executive Summary disposes of the phenomenon of Islamic jihadist terrorism: “Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists are taught to expect Americans to abuse them. They are recruited based on false propaganda that says the United States is out to destroy Islam. Treating detainees harshly only reinforces that distorted view, increases resistance to cooperation, and creates new enemies.”

The editors at National Review had a swift and potent response to Levin’s report, (“Torturing the Evidence”), that skewers Levin’s report as “flawed in its fundamental assumptions and fictional in its sweeping conclusions.”

The document, the editors write, is only “the latest chapter in the Democrats’ torture narrative — a warped tale that trivializes true torture by confounding it with less extreme forms of interrogation. The committee thoroughly misrepresents the legal standards that govern detainee treatment and ignores non-partisan investigations that have found no evidence of a systematic program of abuse.”

Moreover, Levin’s report falsifies the history of our detainee and interrogation policies, in order to blame any possible wrongdoing exclusively on Rumsfeld, Bush, and Republicans:

In September 2002, senior leaders on the Senate and House intelligence committees — Democrats and Republicans — began receiving briefings on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program,” including the use of waterboarding on top al-Qaeda operatives. Among the leaders briefed was Nancy Pelosi, now speaker of the House.

The lawmakers raised no objections. According to Porter Goss, a congressman at that time and later head of the CIA, their chief concern was whether “the methods were tough enough.” But Carl Levin, the Democrat who runs the Senate Armed Services Committee, managed to suppress any mention of Speaker Pelosi and her congressional colleagues last week when his committee released its misleading and relentlessly partisan report, titled “Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.”

I find Levin’s action all the more odious as this kind of incendiary propaganda isn’t even timed to help Obama get elected. The object, as suggested in the News headline, was to "pin abuse on Rumsfeld." It is intended only to further slander the Bush administration, and to handcuff Obama so that he will lighten the pressure on Islamic radicals.

I believe there ought to be reasonable debate about what constitutes torture, and the levels to which those on the front lines--commanders primarily concerned with protecting their soldiers, and intelligence officials with a duty to protect innocent people from attacks--can go to obtain information from captured jihadists.

But Democrats are no more capable of discussing that subject reasonably than they’ve been able to discuss America’s military strategy in response to 9/11. (“Quagmire!”--“Blood for oil!”--“Imperialism!”-- “Bush lied!!!”). For some reason Democrats just have to boil everything down to a simplistic invective meant to demonize Republicans in power, or to silence opposition from the minority when it is them in power.

Rather than foster a national discussion about the complex moral and political problem--and a never before encountered problem--of detaining and interrogating stateless, lawless, homicidal fanatics who think nothing of losing their own lives if it means killing infidels for Allah--the Left simply began screaming that we had no right to detain them at all if we’re not going to extend full protections to them as criminal defendants under the Bill of Rights. This is a profoundly stupid idea, and even Obama has been backpedaling away from it since it's his turn to tackle the problem now. This either/or approach always ends the discussion before it has a chance to begin.

Michigan's BRIDGES To Somewhere--We Just Don't Quite Know Where

Once again our local BRIDGES regime is contributing to the weakening of security.

According to Detroit News Islamic Affairs Correspondent Gregg Krupa,

Arab-American and Muslim leaders complained to federal law enforcement officials Thursday that members of their community are being detained without cause amid a crackdown on immigration violations that began late last month.During the monthly meeting of Building Respect in Diverse Groups to Enhance Sensitivity (BRIDGES), which was formed by community leaders and law enforcement in 2003 to build cooperation and air grievances, the leaders said people who normally remain free on bond, or because of court-issued stays, have been detained in county jails. Others were arrested with no apparent cause, they said. ("Arab leaders say people wrongfully held").

It's now being reported that, thanks to the influence of Imad Hamad and other BRIDGES enforcers, immigration officials have actually lowered the number of illegal aliens being deported from the Arab community--and ICE officials are proud of it:

Officials of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said a smaller percentage of men of Arab descent and Muslims are being deported than in past years.

"Members of the Arab community represent a very small percentage of our detained population, currently only 5 percent," said Khaalid Walls, a public affairs officer for ICE in Detroit. "In 2007, only 6 percent of our removals were from the Arab community and now in 2008 that percentage is 2 percent."

There. Who says affirmative action doesn't work?

Not that BRIDGES leaders are satisfied, as they're continuing to complain that too many illegal aliens are being detained, as they say, for no reason. Which sort of bypasses the glaring point that illegal immigrants being detained for being here illegally is, ipso facto, a reason for detaining someone.

I don't know how Krupa's article ever passed anyone's smell test. This pathetic example of government abuse was as good as it got:

"My stepdad landed from Lebanon today and they took him from the airport to a hospital room, and they are holding him and not letting us see him," said Mohamed Elkadri of Canton. His stepfather, Mahmoud Hammoud of Dearborn was held Thursday at Oakwood Annapolis Hospital in Wayne. "He needs his medication."

I'll admit Oakwood doesn't have the best reputation. But I hardly see how being transported directly from the airport to the hospital is proof of government neglect of a detainee's health.

Naturally, and of no surprise, Krupa's article contains not a single word why Elkadri's stepfather might have been detained at the airport after arriving from Lebanon. (No visa, maybe? Unlawful documents? Or just lurking ICE officials who spotted him and said, "Hey, Roy, look at that sick guy coming off Air Arabia Flight 910 from Beirut. He look Arab to you? Let's get him!")

No matter. He's here now, so the ICE quota system gives him a 98% chance of being able to remain here as long as he wants.

The Supreme Court's Game of Bait-and-Switch

From Chief Justice Roberts’s dissent in today’s tragic Supreme Court decision in Boumediene v. Bush.:

Today the Court strikes down as inadequate the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants. The political branches crafted these procedures amidst an ongoing military conflict, after much careful investigation and thorough debate. The Court rejects them today out of hand, without bothering to say what due process rights the detainees possess, without explaining how the statute fails to vindicate those rights, and before a single petitioner has even attempted to avail himself of the law’s operation. And to what effect? The majority merely replaces a review system designed by the people’s representatives with a set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date. One cannot help but think, after surveying the modest practical results of the majority’s ambitious opinion, that this decision is not really about the detainees at all, but about control of federal policy regarding enemy combatants.

The majority is adamant that the Guantanamo detainees are entitled to the protections of habeas corpus—its opinion begins by deciding that question. I regard the issue as a difficult one, primarily because of the unique and unusual jurisdictional status of Guantanamo Bay. I nonetheless agree with Justice Scalia’s analysis of our precedents and the pertinent history of the writ, and accordingly join his dissent. The important point for me, however, is that the Court should have resolved these cases on other grounds. Habeas is most fundamentally a procedural right, a mechanism for contesting the legality of executive detention. The critical threshold question in these cases, prior to any inquiry about the writ’s scope, is whether the system the political branches designed protects whatever rights the detainees may possess. If so, there is no need for any additional process, whether called “habeas” or something else.

Excerpt of Justice Scalia’s dissent:

America is at war with radical Islamists. The enemy began by killing Americans and American allies abroad: 241 at the Marine barracks in Lebanon, 19 at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, 224 at our embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and 17 on the USS Cole in Yemen. On September 11, 2001, the enemy brought the battle to American soil, killing 2,749 at the Twin Towers in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., and 40 in Pennsylvania. It has threatened further attacks against our homeland; one need only walk about buttressed and barricaded Washington, or board a plane anywhere in the country, to know that the threat is a serious one. Our Armed Forces are now in the field against the enemy, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Last week, 13 of our countrymen in arms were killed.

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court’s blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today. The President relied on our settled precedent in Johnson v. Eisentrager, 339 U. S. 763 (1950) , when he established the prison at Guantanamo Bay for enemy aliens. Citing that case, the President’s Office of Legal Counsel advised him “that the great weight of legal authority indicates that a federal district court could not properly exercise habeas jurisdiction over an alien detained at [Guantanamo Bay].” Had the law been otherwise, the military surely would not have transported prisoners there, but would have kept them in Afghanistan, transferred them to another of our foreign military bases, or turned them over to allies for detention. Those other facilities might well have been worse for the detainees themselves.

In the long term, then, the Court’s decision today accomplishes little, except perhaps to reduce the well-being of enemy combatants that the Court ostensibly seeks to protect. In the short term, however, the decision is devastating. At least 30 of those prisoners hitherto released from Guantanamo Bay have returned to the battlefield. Some have been captured or killed. But others have succeeded in carrying on their atrocities against innocent civilians. In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes.. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. . . .

Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of-powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional” test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.

The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today. I dissent.