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The Left’s War with America
By Trenton | June 26, 2007
I spent some time Sunday morning browsing the posts from the folks at blah3.com. Man, those guys have some real issues. There was one post with which I was particularly interested, entitled “Mommy, what’s a gulag?” I was interested to see what would cause someone to bring up the subject of the gulag in today’s conversation. Of course, the article refers to the base at Guantanamo, comparing it to the gulag, and is critical of the Republican candidates’ positions on the use of the facility there for keeping prisoners of war.
Of course, the idea that Guantanamo is a gulag is silly. The Gulag is where the Soviets kept political prisoners to keep them silent. People who spent time there usually did so without the benefit of a jury trial, or the chance to dispute the evidence against them. In almost all cases, the prisoners of the gulag were Soviet citizens and the Soviet government violated its own Constitution to put them there.
At Guantanamo, there were exactly two (out of nearly 1,000) prisoners that had some claim to American citizenship. The men being held there are prisoners of war. They were all caught engaging in warlike activities against American soldiers during wartime on the battlefield. Guantanamo is a POW camp, just like the POW camps in which we held German prisoners during WWII. Were we operating a gulag then, too? No reasonable observer would say we were.
The author, “daedalus,” acknowledges the exceptionally fine treatment the prisoners receive there, but has a problem with the fact that these characters are being held there without trial. One wonders why? My attempt to post a comment to the site was unsuccessful, due to a problem with their security features, but during the course of crafting my response to the post, I was struck by a thought that brightly illuminated the reasoning behind the actions and methods of the modern Left in America.
The Left demands that we treat prisoners of the war against Jihad with the same Constitutional protections afforded to American citizens, i.e. the right to trial by jury of your peers, the right to an attorney, the right of habeas corpus, etc. Now, I will concede the right to habeas corpus, which is the right to be presented before a judge who will determine if there is sufficient evidence for the government to detain you. Habeas corpus should be limited for non-citizens, however, to ensure that the government need not divulge sensitive information in the course of presenting its evidence. You cannot depend on the loyalty of judges anymore it seems.
The Bush Administration at first balked at allowing this limited right to those captured on the battlefield, but the Supreme Court ruled otherwise in Rasul v. Bush (2004), and the administration initially respected the ruling. Since then, Congress has nullified the ruling with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which denied jurisdiction to federal courts to hear habeas corpus claims from Guantanamo prisoners, which Congress can do under Article III of the Constitution. There is an excellent article by James Taranto in today’s Opinion Journal on this issue, or watch video of Mr. Taranto talking about it.
We must keep in mind that these detainees were not just people that our military grabbed off the street because they looked Arabic. These men were caught engaging in warlike activities against our soldiers in wartime. They do not meet the Geneva Conventions requirements for enemy combatants because they fight for no specific nation, they wear no uniform and no identifying insignia. This puts them precisely under the definition of unlawful enemy combatant under the Conventions. The laws Congress has passed regarding our treatment of these prisoners is largely based upon the Conventions. To say that we are denying these people their basic Human Rights is misinformed or deceitful.
The complaint that the Left has had even before the ruling in Rasul is that these prisoners should be given a full jury trial in a civil court with the full panoply of rights recognized in citizens, which would necessarily include a right to full discovery and access to the government’s most sensitive information regarding its activities in the War on Terror. Why they should have this level of rights afforded them is never explained beyond vague claims of human rights. But whether or not these are even “human rights” is a subject for another article and won’t be treated here.
The difficulty arising from the extension of these rights to non-citizen, enemy combatants should be easily apparent. In fact, I believe that most observers would readily recognize the difference between the rights of citizens and the rights of prisoners of war. The Left is not making this distinction, however. The call for enemy combatants to be extended the same rights that citizens enjoy includes two flaws that, if implemented, would prove fatal to our system of government and which, I think, exposes the character and motives of those making the call.
First, extending the rights of citizens to enemy combatants degrades the rights of citizens. It puts citizens on the same legal standing as (and therefore viewed by the law as) enemies of our government. If there is no distinction between the legal standings of citizens or enemy soldiers, then citizens must be viewed (and thus, treated) by the government as enemies.
It also means there are rights that are above those which citizens enjoy. To illustrate, we know that our rights to free speech are balanced by our enjoyment of the blessings of society. We give up a portion of our freedoms to be part of our society. An example of this is the limitation on speech which says you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. If we assume that the rights of citizens are the same as an enemy’s rights, we must infer that there is a level of rights above that enjoyed by citizens. How is one to obtain that level of rights? How is the obtaining of those rights decided, and by whom? Are these higher rights simply the rights which citizens enjoy, except without any limitations whatever? If so, then society is not society at all but merely people living in proximity to one another with a common government.
Second, if we accept the premise that enemies can be granted these rights by the government, we must assume that those rights are also a grant by government to the citizens. And if we accept that premise in turn, we must reject the founding principles of our nation, which include the concept of rights as a gift from God, superseding government. “Rights” granted by government, especially to non-citizens, are historically called “privileges” which can be granted and revoked at the whim of government. If we elevate privileges to be equal with rights, we destroy rights altogether.
The rights we enjoy under the Constitution are a subset of the natural, inalienable rights with which we are “endowed by [our] Creator.” Indeed, inalienable rights are the hallmark of our western Anglo-Saxon civilization. Belief in these God-given, inalienable rights distinguishes our society from every other on the planet and is the foundation of our system and institutions of government. Without this belief the entire system crumbles, resulting in a catastrophic paradigm shift toward unlimited governmental control and power over the lives of ordinary citizens. In this paradigm, government becomes illiberal, oppressive, venal, and controlling, and “We the People” are no longer our own masters.
But this is the Liberal view of government. It is this paradigm which the Left insists we adopt, and which they have spent 40 of the last 50 years in control of Congress trying to create. Now that their majority in Congress is no longer a given, they have resorted to legislating through the courts with the help of judicial activists in the justice system. Either way, their aim is the overthrow of our traditions and institutions in favor of a new governmental system founded in political radicalism. It is indeed a war.
Topics: Ideology and Philosophy, War on Terror |