Professor Philip Hamburger at Columbia Law School, in his paper, “Beyond Protection” recalls the nearly forgotten doctrine of Protection in connection with the problem of terrorism. Protection (and my understanding of the term is doubtless imperfect as a layman) is apparently a legal theory in which the legal rights of the defendant vary according to the degree of his allegiance to the country he sets himself against. Professor Hamburger writes:
This Article explains the principle of protection and its implications for terrorism. Under the principle of protection, as understood in early American law, allegiance and protection were reciprocal. As a result, a person without allegiance was without protection, including the protection of the law. Not owing allegiance, such a person had no obligation to obey American law; moreover, not having protection, he had no rights under such law. This was the principle on which early American law dealt with enemy aliens and other persons who did not owe allegiance, including those who today would be called “terrorists.”
The early Americans had to solve actual problems involving foreign nationals “privately at war” with the United Status. Hamburger explains:
Imagine that Middle Easterners of dubious intent turned up in Virginia in 1785: What would the Founders have done? Would they have detained them without trial? Would they have interrogated them without allowing them access to lawyers? Would they have denied them habeas corpus? Would they have denied them habeas even if they were held within the United States? Would they have taken these measures against them even if they were acting on behalf of a nonsovereign power? And on what principle could the Founders have done all of this without violating the law? Astonishingly, the answers need not be hypothetical, for “Algerians” were in Virginia in 1785.
Its an interesting thesis, which runs counter to the modern tendency to diminish the difference between citizens and noncitizens before the law. The Supreme Court in Rasul v. Bush and elaborated in Boumediene v. Bush have granted habeas and other civil rights to anyone in a location under the “control” of the United States. And there are those who argue that this extension of rights has not gone far enough. Professor Hamburger says,
Some academic commentators go even further. David Cole argues against unequal treatment of citizens and enemy aliens. Yet rather than insist that “citizens and foreign nationals must be treated identically in every respect,” he makes the broader point that there are profound dangers in adopting dehumanizing conceptions of enemy aliens.
Professor Hamburger drily notices that the unjust wartime internment of the Nisei is often used to argue for the extension of rights to noncitizens when it should demonstrate the opposite. The internment of the Nisei was reprehensible precisely because they were citizens. As Americans, the Nisei had rights. Captured members of the Imperial Japanese Army did not have the same protection, at least not then. He takes pains to explain that tiered rights do not necessarily mean an open season even on terrorists. They still have some rights, just not all the rights of citizens. “It does not relieve the government of other, more restraining mechanisms … it does not excuse the government from its obligation to act in accord with the law.”
But while some lament the residual inequalities between citizens and enemy aliens, Hamburger argues that the elimination of the distinction has made it conceptually difficult to consistently and coherently fight terrorism. By throwing everyone into the same category, authorities are placed in a dilemma where effective and expedient actions against terrorism also have the effect of eroding the civil rights of the citizens. Since the same ruleset must apply to both, what is decided for one may influence the treatment of the other. By treating the two categories as separate, Hamburger argues, the authorities gained the ability to act against the one without undermining the privileges of the other. He argues that the authorities and the citizens both gain freedom by making the distinction.
Although it may seem worrisome that the principle of protection excludes some individuals from legal protection, this is precisely how the principle preserves both safety and civil liberty … it allows the nation vigorously to deny such protection to persons who have not submitted to allegiance. The principle thereby permits the nation to defend itself without having to compromise civil liberties.
Whatever the legal merits of the Professor Hamburger’s argument, common sense suggests that if the authorities are not allowed to treat the population as two different samples then the entire population will be treated according to some average. With authorities unable — or unwilling — to distinguish between population A and population B, the two will both be subjected to some kind of compromise restriction. Recently, a British newspaper complained that ordinary citizens were being questioned and their cameras inspected under Under Section 44 of the British Terrorism Act 2000. People taking pictures of Central London, even of a fish and chips shop or the pavement, have been accosted by policemen and summarily interrogated. The Daily Mail in an article dated December 12, 2009 wrote:
Section 44 gives police the right to stop and search anyone within certain geographical areas without the usual requirement of reasonable suspicion. It was brought in as a counter-terrorism measure. But, increasingly, members of the general public are complaining that because of it they are being treated like potential terrorists on reconnaissance missions. …
Jeff Moore, chairman of the British Press Photographers Association (BPPA), concurs. ‘It’s a constant thing. It’s particularly prevalent in London and around Westminster. … ‘There was one case of a professor of history who was stopped because he was taking a photograph of a park bench in South London, for goodness sake.’ …
Two weeks ago, BBC photographer Jeff Overs was standing outside the Tate Modern by the Thames in London, taking pictures of sunset over St Paul’s Cathedral, when he was approached by a policewoman and a community support officer who said they were ‘stopping people who were taking photographs as a counter-terrorism measure’. Overs was asked to give his name, address and date of birth and issued with an anti-terrorism stop-and-search form – this in a place full of people enjoying a classic view of the capital, many of them recording it on their camera or mobile phone. …
In April, two Austrians were taken aback when they were stopped at Walthamstow bus station in East London where, like so many millions of other visitors to Britain before them, they had been taking pictures of London’s famous red buses.
They were asked to delete their pictures and, unaware that police have no authority to enforce this without a warrant, they complied. … Alex Turner, from Kent, discovered the cost of questioning police authority in the summer, after he was stopped by two men on Chatham High Street while taking a picture of a fish and shop called Mick’s Plaice. … He took pictures of the two officers as they approached him – and was then arrested, held handcuffed in a police van for more than 20 minutes, searched, and interviewed by two plain-clothes officers.
The need to treat everyone identically will — whatever its legal justification — lead to some bizarre and even absurd situations. It’s interesting to consider whether the necessity of convicting Khalid Sheik Mohammed will lead to developments which may have unfortunate consequences for the rights of citizens or fortunate consequences for the rights of terrorists. After all, if they’re both the same thing, then everyone gets mixed up in the same gravy. Making citizens equal to outlaws engaged in private warfare against America creates effects in both directions.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
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On the other hand the left is creating a new form of crime called hate crime. It gives harsher sentencing for crimes if they can be proved to be motivated by “hate.” There is an effort to use “hate” to make speech a crime if the language is hateful. This is going to lead to unintended consequences for the left if they continue to pursue it.
James Lynch Fitzstephen from Galway, Ireland, who was the Mayor of Galway when he hanged his own son from the balcony of his house after convicting him of the murder of a Spanish visitor in 1493 . It was argued that the son couldn’t be convicted since the Spaniard was not a citizen of Galway and didn’t have the right of protection. That argument lost.
Now that you have so many Alinskyan alumni, how are the graduates of Hamburger to prevail? This post (and the handling of the case of KSH) illustrates the self-defeating results of political correctness when it is allowed to flourish and destroy your society’s cohesion.
Nice one, Wretch! The real world civil rights perils of treating foreign terrorists the same as American citizens never even occurred to me (although I think it is utterly mad).
Now we have to consider the legal status and charges to be brought against Islamic terrorists who happen to be American citizens.
Time to dust off the legal term, traitor? Should there not be particular opprobrium for someone who should know better and to whom we extended the presumption of reason in good faith as an American?
A similar problem exists in the apparent refusal to clearly treat disparately non-combatants from combatants. “Civilian” can still be “combatant”, just as “soldier” can still be “non-combatant”.
Failing to think in terms of “combatant” and “non-combatant” risks the safety of the latter in the pursuit of the former.
Wretchard’s essay is a good summary of the domestic version.
I believe this goes back to Lawfare over Warfare. The US under the control of the Obama/Clinton administration is conducting Lawfare. It has no experience in Warfare. As people in the legal industry know Lawfare can be very lucrative to certain players.
You see it the Navy Seals case (a terrorist claims he got a fat lip while in custody). The “Flying Imam” case is another. There are many more. Lawfare certainly pays well to certain participants.
I will say that the UK doesn’t have the same legal structure as the US. They depend on certain factors and outside players (the CIA). They are a fragmented socialized nation. And, their MSM is filled with leftists. It’s hard to apply our laws to the UK.
Now, Lawfare produces phenomenon where it is easier to shake down the average citizen and then let him/her go for year-end statistical performance ratings by law enforcement. Every law enforcement office is afraid of being accused of profiling or being racist. Hence, they do the CYA dance and make a lot of sham stops just fill out the paper work.
I hate to say it, but profiling does work. It probably should be implemented. Stopping and questioning everyone with a camera is counter productive and costly to the economy – but maybe that is what the Obama/Clinton Administration wants.
2nd try.
OK, I see the first one (with all the mistakes).
Good article, agree with most except that Japanese Americans were interned.
To keep it as simple as possible,IIRC Japanese nationals were interned just like the German and Italians.
The Japanese Americans were ordered to relocate away from the west coast, those that didn’t voluntary relocate were force to relocated to camps that they could leave if they decided to relocate on their own.
Japanese Americans who were married to (or children of) Japanese nationals were allowed to go into internment with them or relocate.
I agree there were many injustices committed in the process.
Was Executive Order 9066 necessary? I’ve read that there were spies on the west coast that our intelligence knew about because we’d broken the Japanese code, and like Churchill’s Coventry decision, the chance of exposing that the code was broken was too great a risk so the known spies, along with unknown spies, were relocated or interned.
IMHO A good general info page is at:
http://hubpages.com/hub/Japanese_Internment
Uh, I expect that the “Bobbies” are showing some zelous behaviour in the above facts. You don’t search and find terorists like that, it’s a long approach, with cell phones, internet surveys, discreet followings where they go, who they meet.
Bobbies are not ment to find terrorists, but to empech “hooligans” to annoys the mobs, to discourage little gangsta to rob the passing-by…
Great article. I agree that aliens should be treated differently than citizens. I can think of several very good reasons, the foremost is national defense and the protection of the citizens of a nation. This is not limited the the USA. As late as WW II German military dressed in US uniforms were captured and executed within days if not hours. There was no public outcry.
The concept of giving non-uniformed combatants and alien non-uniformed combatants anything but a quick quick and execution is flawed. This has nothing to du with ” human rights” of “fairness”, but may be the only way to protect both a nation and its citizens.
A little reality in the legal system would be a breath of fresh air. I am a little tired and fed up the the lofty goals of politicians and lawyers. These goals of theirs are just not based in reality.
Good reading! Citizens accused of crimes should be treated differently than those who are not.
How differently? I haven’t got a clue.
Lawfare? sure, against the USA, not against the terrorists.
These people want to do anything and everything possible to harm us. Their precioues jihadis are more importnat to them than theiur fwllow citzend. If this country was possessed a shred of sanity, Obama and holderould have been impeached the moment the decidion to bring KSM to NYC was made.
They cannot move but hurt the USA and the West. They are constitutionally incapable of it. Their every thought, their every every breath, there every action is focused on destroying this country.
Our lives and those of our children have no meaning at all to them. What matter is their bizarre, supercilious self importance. They are like 14 year olds. These precedents will haunt us for decade.Our enemies laugh outright and smack their lips.
They have open contempt for us all and everything that is dear in our nation, culture and civilization.
They are Bolsheviks. That is what they do.
There will be no end to it until they are marginalized, and the lawyer is demoted to the role he had in early times.
The GOP is missing a big opportunity here.
Wretchard,
Thank you for your discussion. It is because of posts like this that I subscribe.
Best wishes,
Jim
The term “cynic” is derived from the Greek word for dog. A famous Greek, Diogenyes, I believe, once declared that he would live as a dog in the streets, owing alliegance to no one, a Citizen of the World – specifically that part of the world that did not want him to fight to defend the community, or for that matter, obey its laws. “Oh, Athens is going to war? Well, today I am a citizen of Egypt.”
Perhaps the reason the elites are so concerned that all be given the rights of citizens because they have no intention of performing their civic duty in any respect. So they want to cheapen citizenship as much as possible. After all, how can you lock up a Charlie Sheen for doing drugs or a Sandy Burgler for stealing documents when you are giving noncitizens with obvious evil intent the full rights of citizens?
They are indeed cynics.
A comment about the Nisei. I read a book written by a Japanese intelligence officer titled ‘How Japan Plans to Win’. It was published in Japan before the war and a translated version was released in the USA in 1942. In the book he speculated that in an invasion scenario, the Nisei would rise up and join the Imperial Army and that the Army would furnish them weapons. In the context of the time, I can see how this may have entered into the equation that led to the Nisei being interned. It doesn’t make the decision right, but it may help explain the the thinking of our decision makers.
Until the Supreme Court is brought to heel, the left will continue to make a hash of reason, logic and the Constitution. Until then, keep up the good fight.
So, to summarize: If you have to treat terrorists like citizens, then you also have to treat citizens like terrorists.
feeble,
This is why internment was advisable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_Incident
Not long after 9/11 a liberal lawyer friend had transportation problems and I was driving him around. We had a conversation covering many of these points. He took what could be called the “Eric Holder View” — but at a time when The Holder himself didn’t hold it.
I said, “I don’t see how you can catch these guys in Afghanistan and drag them back to New York for trial.” He said they tried Mafia types and spies all the time, and procedures were in place to handle evidence and keep the identity of juries secret. My point was that the Mafia and spies have a stake in the system. Mobsters might want to corrupt a juror, given the chance, but they do not want to destroy the Jury System because the Jury System protects them. Terrorist want to tear it down. They don’t have to attack the courthouse. They can blow up any school in the county — or country — and make a declaration.
Unfortunately for my lawyer friend, he was stuck in the car with me and had to listen. I suggested congress set up a special system of courts that would handle terrorist caught overseas. It could have its own “due process” and be supervised by the Supreme Court. Terrorist who were in the US illegally — I guess we can call them undocumented terrorists — could also be turned over. Documented terrorists would get an evidence hearing before being turned over. A naturalized citizen would get a trial to strip citizenship or perhaps a warrant signed by the President after the evidence hearing (to make the President directly accountable for the action). And so on.
I doubt if my lawyer friend had ever heard anything quite like it, at least since starting law school. Of course, I was known as something of a Neanderthal (though in the good sense of the term) so it slid by. And it was my car.
This post has been linked for the HOT5 Daily 12/13/2009, at The Unreligious Right
re Riddle #17: Yes. I had read of that incident, but I couldn’t remember the name of it. It appeared in an article of WWII History magazine a couple of years ago. In the article the author stated this may have contributed to internment as well.
Avatar
Its story line is something dances with wolves.
Most of the star trek episodes took place between 2250 and 2995.
Avatar with slightly less advanced technology– takes place in the year 2154.
Its the embodiment of sage saying from the 70′s-80′s: one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. that was a time when terrorists and freedom fighters fought their wars in other countries. not in the usa.
for purposes of this discussion I agree with Hamburger’s proposition.
a legal theory in which the legal rights of the defendant vary according to the degree of his allegiance to the country he sets himself against.
There is an interesting extension of this theory that is universally ignored today.
Take Michael Moore for example. Or John Kerry. Or Sean Penn. (Please)
When citizens are allowed to undertake private action in direct contravention to the safety, security, well-being, and foundational interests of the homeland, there are laws that address such behavior. For Jimmy Carter or Ted Kennedy…John Kerry and the fraudulent whole of the Winter Soldier scam.
When non-citizens undertake action to overthrow the government, or plot to harm its citizens in a concerted action or impact en masse, that is an act of war, not sedition.
Our dear leftists intentionally blur the distinction. Because we have become so weak-willed in condemning, much less prosecuting the harmful, seditious, treasonous acts of our elected officials, much less our “countrymen here in name only” (CHINO’S), THEY have successfully undermined our ability to prosecute even war criminals.
It makes little sense to quibble over the citizenship status of a war being prosecuted against the United States by infiltration cell by cell of her sworn enemies, who plot to blow up her buildings, poison her water supply, release nuclear holocaust up her.
The niceties attendant to the interminable appeal process does not apply to enemy action. We must respond in a military fashion and military justice only need apply. So the seminal issue to be defined is enemy action, not “place of residence”.
When the President of the United States is in constant bow and scrape mode, apologizing for our existence, besmirching our decisions to self-defend, and the First Lady announces she is not proud of the country, we aren’t likely to see “protection” for our countrymen leap to the fore. Michael Moore and Ward Churchill called our enemies heroes and us, “little Eichmanns”.
We no longer need protection simply from external forces known and unknown, but from the brazen leftist enemy within, the CHINO’s.
Unless and until we are willing to confront the direct attack on ourselves as a nation and a people from the “tear us apart from the inside” leftists born, bred and infesting here, we will dither on how to treat their comrades in arms born and bred elsewhere.
Enemy action is so obvious around us. Our own communication stream refuses to call the enemy “terrorists”. It seeks “root causes” and alibis for those who mean to destroy us. It hides facts, distorts news and bastardizes truth to fit the meme.
Our politicians make pronouncements here and around the world that dehumanizes us as a nation and a people, makes us out to be “the enemy” of the world. Our universities, even our high schools and often our grammar schools have in loco parenti teaching our children revisionist history that paints us as evil.
No offense intended to this article and the issues it raises, but this is attempting to fix a leaky faucet in the second floor bathroom, while the whole foundation is crumbling.
We can no longer trust our own information stream. We can’t get facts and the truth is beyond our grasp. There is no science any longer, only “political” science. And we can’t identify enemy action, because we have lost the ability to define the “enemy”.
“First let’s Frag all the Jag”
The idea that if everyone has the same rights, the rights of citizens will shrink as the rights of non-citizens grow, leads me to think on the actual uses to which RICO and portions of the PATRIOT act have been put—RICO was passed to combat “Organized Crime” but as there is no good operational definition of that, as written the law applies to just about anything possibly criminal involving more than 2 people. Likewise, some of the PATRIOT Act (which in its entirety I supported and still support, btw) provisions, esp financial, have been used for things far removed from terrorism or threats to the government, and in fact have started to merge with RICO in the toolkit of investigators and prosecutors looking at white-collar crime in general. So, there is plenty of recent precedent for poorly-thought out and poorly defined legal theories to be embodied in law and the law used for purposes far from those of the people who approved them.
As a country and a culture (at least the Anglo-Saxon world), some decades ago we started replacing LEGAL thinking with LEGALISTIC–it pretends to be legal-based and looks somewhat like legal thinking but it is shallow, devoid of real legal content, and emotion-driven. It does not try to relate the law to real world problems, but looks inward to form a legal system driven by internal arguments and without reference to real-world results. Or, the destructive results are what its proponents want and the legalistic pose gave them cover to do it, including support from people too stupid or trusting to see where this was going. Probably, some of both. (OT–A lot like what has been going on in Education, for that matter.)
Apparently the law schools are full of this, are training lawyers in it by the boatload, and they now populate much of the judiciary, government (including elected officials up to and including the President, as well as lawyers in the bureaucracy and military) and the corporate and law-firm environments.
This perspective takes the phrase, “The Consttution isn’t a suicide pact” and says, in effect, whether it is or not is irrelevant, the Constitution and law are what we say it is, period.
Of course, Con Law is Ground Zero for all this, and our President’s one claim to intellectual chops is that he used to teach Con Law.
hmmmm…..
Comments about the Nisei, those of the 442nd regimental combat team
“All of us can’t stay in the [internment] camps until the end of the war. Some of us have to go to the front. Our record on the battlefield will determine when you will return and how you will be treated. I don’t know if I’ll make it back.”
Technical Sergeant Abraham Ohama, Company “F”, 442nd RCT, Killed in Action 10/20/1944
“They were superb! That word correctly describes it: superb!
They took terrific casualties. They showed rare courage and tremendous fighting spirit. Not too much can be said of the performance of those battalions in Europe and everybody wanted them….”
General George C. Marshall
“…I had the honor to command the men of the 442nd Combat Team. You fought magnificently in the field of battle and wrote brilliant chapters in the military history of our country.”
“They demonstrated conclusively the loyalty and valor of our American citizens of Japanese ancestry in combat.”
General Mark W. Clark
“…I cannot say, however, that their “Go For Broke” service has ever been adequately honored, but I do know that any objective appraisal of the record of this unit will place it high up in the annals of our military history…
Whether in France, Italy or elsewhere, I know of no units in the American Army that fought and persevered more gallantly than did those Nisei companies and battalions.”
John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War
“The Nisei troops are among the best in the United States Army and the respect and the appreciation due honorable, loyal, and courageous soldiers should be their’s rather than the scorn and ridicule they have been receiving from some thoughtless and uninformed citizens and veterans.”
Major General E.M. Almond
“The members of the Combat Team have made a magnificent record of which they and all Americans should be proud. This record, without a doubt, is the most important single factor in creating in this country a more understanding attitude toward the people of Japanese descent.”
Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior
The internment camps were a blot on America’s honor.
http://the442.org/
I could yammer on about the social contract, but that really isn’t where I see the problem.
There are people among us who think it’s bad if we kill enemies. I suppose these are mostly the same people who think it’s bad if we lock up criminals.
You can wrap this up in forgiveness, you can wrap this up in thinking the perps are also victims, you can wrap it up in PC tenderness not to impose anything on anybody.
Me, I think it shows our quality if we do kill enemies, quickly, openly, proudly, without regret.
To some degree, it’s a matter of how you see your own role, your own power. If you see yourself as omnipotent, you can forgive a lot. And, you can take the luxury of trying to punish very finely, with infinite precision, just the perpetrators and not their supporters. If you see your power as limited, you do not want to see it eroded, and perhaps paradoxically you need to exercise it earlier and more bluntly.
All these legalisms and contracts reduce to worldview, IMHO.
This article points to modern scholarship asserting that primitive man was monotheistic rather than polytheistic. That for example, animism was a decadent state derived from a previous monotheism. This is interesting because the paradigm for modern anthropology was set back in the 1870′s when anthropologists asserted that men were originally animists–from which they built up more hierarchical theological forms until they topped it all off with monotheism.
Genesis and the Religion of Primitive Man (Was monotheism the original religion of primitive man?)
Skim over the first 6-10 paragraphs. After that
it picks up speed.
This paper serves as a sort of parallel discussion with the current topic.
This bothered me in the 60′s with that set of revolutionaries. The failure of logic that puts our Constitution to work to protect those who would destroy it is patent nonsense. e hear people assert that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. It wasnt back then before the lawyers go hold of it.
The Man Without a Country had no civil rights when the story was written, because he had renounced them. Sentiment of the story aside, he aws ind deep trouble. Interesting.
I have always believed in Original Intent. Context is everything. Its the only way to understand any cultural writing. You cant understand the Old Testament without some understanding of Judaism. You cant understand the New Testament without an understanding of the Old Testament. You cant understand Shakespeare without some understanding of European history. Huckleberry Finn is a shallow work absent Life on the Mississippi and an understanding of a racially mixed but unenlightened society.
If everything is presented as de Novo we ignore the experience of all that have gone before.
What we did to the Nesei was wrong. It was presented as so much of FDR’s stuff as something new and a better guaranteed Govt way to fix the problem. Just more fascism.
Thanks, Wretchard, for this post. This is a concept I’ve been trying to get at for a long time.
Exactly, Richard. The result of giving equal rights to all, including those who reject the polity, will be to diminish the rights of the majority.
16. WillDoMathForFood:
So, to summarize: If you have to treat terrorists like citizens, then you also have to treat citizens like terrorists.
/////
this is pretty much what happened after 911 when they started frisking little old ladies boarding airplanes.
If someone violates our civil agreements, then he/she signals that it means nothing to them. Hence, so be it. Blow them away. What’s the problem?
“The internment camps were a blot on America’s honor.”
So, Sam Hall, do you want shari’a imposed on us or not? Assuming the answer is no, how is it that people with your mindset are preventing this from happening?
In the spirit of Wretchard’s investigation of effects flowing from definitions, I would ask Sam Hall and herb which was worse: 1) Internment that protected non-Nisei citizens from the actions of any (presumably few) traitorous Nisei and also protected the Nisei from the vigilante action that would have surely arisen after a traitorous incident, or 2) Just allowing human nature take its bloody course on both sides? The patriotism of the 442nd soldiers is irrelevant to this question. As is the clear injustice of lost Nisei property due to federal government incompetence.
From a more direct angle, what would have been done with Villa if the Punitive Expedition had captured him? Try him in county court in New Mexico, or before a military court? Ah, for the old days of plainspoken labeling: Punitive Expedition, not Operation Enduring Freedom.
herb @ 28 re: The Man Without a Country.
Funny, my mind went immediately to that too. It would seem to me that persons who by virtue of statement or action renounce country deserve fewer considerations afforded by same.
And terrorists, by virtue of having renounced civil norms, deserve even less.
Sam Hall
A few quotes justify your conclusion? This seems to be a more rigorous group at BC.
International Law is the Law of Nations, individuals have no place in it. Over the last 40 years enormous effort has been expended to validate the entirely false concept of Human Rights as individual rights that can be used to appeal beyond the authority of a sovereign democracy’s law. This has been done for three connected reasons;
1) Reduce the legal and moral standing of the Democracies to that of the average arbitrary dictatorship
2) Empower the United Nations and it’s administrative legal system above that of Codes based on consent
3) Gives equal standing to non-state actors in their disputes with traditional nation states.
The first is shown by the actions of the UN Human Rights Commission, in which dictatorships issue condemnations of democracies. The second is shown by the abuse of the International Court at The Hague and a network of complicit local judges and prosecutors who have assumed the power ex cathedra to launch investigations and threaten to sit in judgement on the conduct of officials of democracies. The third has been used by many criminal and terrorist organizations but the policy was driven and the attendant assaults on the standing of traditional democratic states was formulated for one specific group of non-state actors, the Palestinians.
Sam Hall: what is the matter with you people? Why do you pick on this trivial matter, when the Japanese murdered and raped their way acirss Asian. No matter what it is, ww2 and generations after the fact no less, or terrorist today, you side with the enemy and then bizarrely pontificate about American “values” and “honer”.
Let me tell you something: You are a gnat. You are a pisant cipher. You have no right, authority or competency at all to judge those fine people of that war and what they did during it. None whatsoever.
A pansy like you would have not have survived ww2. In that America they knew just what to do with people like you.
No it is not a blot on Americas honor, not that you would kow what America’s honer was about, and it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do at the time. Thank GGod the Democrat Party at least had a shred of patriotism and common sense back then. Even they would not have tolerated you idiocy back then.
My goondess, the left has so perverted history teaching in this country that far too many young people remeber this minor internment business oor Hiroshima as the key points of WW2. That vile Marxist Nancy-boy Ken Burns put together a “history” of WW2 that focused on the Japenese troops and “women’s roles” as crucial factors in the war (and slid in afterwards “hispanic contrbutions” as well). What PC hogwash!
It is absurd. It is like sitting a monkey down ad a Steinway and putting a Beethoven sonata on the music stand in front of it.
It is all just nonsense. It is a obvious attempt at agitprop and degradation of the noble accomplishments of the men of that time. This is beneath contempt.
Enough!
If you had put out that nonsense 55 years ago, you would have had the tar knock out of you on the street, with the entire country cheering them on! No judge in the country would have bothered with your “rights”. They would have known the difference between rights and treason. It is you that would have been held in dishonor.
You are a moral imbeicle. You have no standing whatsoever to make judgements about “America’s honor”. You have no honor. You have no decency.
As always, we get an inversion of reality and values out of you and your tribe of non-entities.
If you cannot have the decency to get things right, at least have the manners to keep your yap shut.
You are both perverted and perverse. I would say that it is you that is that is a a “blot on America’s honor” but that overstates the importance of people like you.
You are a flyspeck on America’s honor. A flea on a flew on a flea.
Lifeofthemind, that is a very cogent assessment.
Aah, but you forgot about world government:)
Mongoose: Those general officers quoted above certain appeared to agree with me. Maybe you could go ask Senator Daniel Inouye Nisei Medal of Honor recipient; combat wounded veteran of WWII.
My father was a Marine in WWII and then transfered to the Air Force where he retired, one brother is a retired Lt Commander, his twin did two tours of Iraq in the Guard. That is how I was raised.
I think we should have used a nuclear weapon on the caves when osama bin laden was there. I think when we catch one, we should get intel anyway we can and then hang him.
Maybe if you had lived and worked with Nisei and Sansei for a decade as I did, you might, just might understand how loyal Americans they are.
A biography of General Walter Kreuger says that objections were raised by European allies to his appointment to a command position there owing to his German ancestry. The matter is mentioned only in passing and no further connection is made between that incident and the fact that he was posted to the Pacific where he was arguably the greatest general American general in the fight against Japan. Though it is not talked about as much, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the kind of residual suspicion that German-Americans may have faced.
The Nisei were deployed to the ETO which had the practical advantage of distinguishing them from a Japanese enemy, which would have been a problem in the Pacific and probably, though this is not stated openly, in order to avoid the moral dilemmas attendant on having to fire on people of Japanese ancestry.
Race and nationality are proxy mechanisms for variables we cannot readily perceive. They are sometimes good proxies. The record of the Nisei and of Americans of German and Italian descent in World War 2 at least suggests that national identity overcame, for the most part, any ethnic allegiances. Interestingly, people sometimes seek to externalize their inner motivations by adopting those proxies of identity. One way this is done is to wear the King’s livery or put on a uniform, which used to signify an intention to wage war according to certain rules. In turn, that entitled the wearer to certain privileges. The now forgotten custom of shooting enemy soldiers found wearing mufti, or the quaint stories describing how British evaders sometimes wore uniform clothing underneath their civilian overcoats in case they were captured hearkens back to this idea of a two-tier treatment: one for those playing the rules and another for the rule-breakers.
One of the reasons for the differential treatment was to creative incentives to play according to the book. And it worked in surprisingly many cases. The uniform counted, even to the Nazis. British soldiers who were Jewish were treated by their German captors as POWs and not sent to the death camps. Maybe this had to do with a rule-following mindset — British uniform, check: Colditz Caste, check — more than anything else. But back in the 1950s, people expected to be treated differently. Watch the old movies where a character says, “you can’t do this to me, I’m an American!” or “I have a British (emphasis) passport”. Today this would be a comedic line.
The differential treatment is still applied by the other side. If you are on an airplane hijacked by terrorists, you are far better off as a citizen of the Third World, who is not even worth a bullet, than to be an America, British or Australian citizen. A friend told me the story of how a bus was waylaid by bandidos on some South American mountain road. The robbers, carrying machetes, boarded the bus. An American tourist tried to hide his passport but it dropped to the floor as the bandido passed. Seeing the passport on the floor, the bandido’s face brightened into a smile. “Ah! Un Gringo!”
So there’s good and bad news in sorting people according to a certain stereotype until a further evaluation is made. The good news is that stratification is often a valuable strategy in dealing with data; the bad news is that you will get things in the strata that don’t belong.
Does the distinction between citizens and non-citizens mean that a foreigner has no rights? Clearly not but where do those rights that they posses come from?
First is that in International Law a State makes provision for its citizens to be treated with respect and offered due process by the legal system of another country when traveling or doing business. That is done by bilateral treaty between the two Nation-States. It is normal for the relationship agreed upon to be one of mutuality in which each country promises that the citizens of the other will have the same rights that the Sovereign offers to its own.
In theory other arrangements are possible. During the last two centuries treaties were concluded between Western powers and others, notably the Emperor of China and the Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, that granted the citizens of the Western country a higher standing, known as extraterritoriality, than was granted by the asiatic power to its own subjects.
There are nations that do not have treaty arrangements for the protection of each others citizens and commerce. That can be due to a lack of contact, now rare, or hostility short of belligerence such as a failure to recognize a government or a suspended state of hostilities without a Peace Treaty. The United States has no diplomatic relations with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and if an American were to be incarcerated there we would in theory rely on the United Nations command, really Americans, to intervene or there is often a situation in which another country that does have relations with both will host an “Interests section” within its own embassy that would act to assist if possible. In Cuba there are US diplomats in Havana who are formally part of the Embassy of Switzerland, and there are Cubans in the Swiss Embassy in Washington DC. In some cases no diplomat from the nation whose citizen is effected is present but others acted as a conduit. During the period when the US had no relations with the People’s Republic of China we used the good offices of Poland.
When two countries are in a state of war those treaties are broken or put in abeyance and the persons and property of a belligerent will then be subject to seizure. Traditionally with a view towards the restoration of relations after the conclusion of hostilities a nation makes some provision in domestic law to protect alien property during the period of rupture and to intern or deport peaceful civilian noncombatants. More recently the concept of refugees who are citizens of a hostile state but fleeing from it has been introduced. There is also but on a more limited level a set of mutual agreements, like the Geneva Conventions, that set standards for the treatment of subjects of a hostile nation during wartime.
The second set of laws that governs the treatment of aliens within a country is the domestic legal code. For the United States that includes the 14th Amendment injunction that grants all persons “due process” and a realization that our system is rooted in principles that flow from the Judeo-christian tradition.
Lev 19:33-34
For the US the biblical standard must be codified in the law to be effective but a judge could cite it in determining the intent of a legal or constitutional guide. Each country uses its sources differently or if from a different ethical tradition may use wildly differing sources, and there is no reason to assume that a person traveling overseas will have the same protections that they do in their own country.
sirius sir,
Thank you
wretchard,
My father got his final combat familiarization training from the Nisei. He said they were incredibly tough and good and they told him not to be in a hurry to get up there. One argument I heard about WW-II was that our Germans (Eisenhower etc.) proved better than their Germans. I once had the British Ambassador almost apoplectic in front of me as he was being screened by TSA., “But we are traveling on British Diplomatic Passports!”
Josh,
(looking down)
The idea of the EU is to be undemocratic because democratic passions lead to two world wars.
LOTM @ 38: excellent post. I’m afraid my entire picture of “international law” is a bunch of comic opera academics and bureaucrats in Belgium putting on robes and airs and declaring themselves emperors of the world.
And various academics around the world, equally powerless and confined to the ivory tower for the mutual benefit of all involved, also becoming uppity and sympathetic to this absurdity and supporting the comic opera.
Which is all one thing, but it saddens me when democratically elected officials then buy into this as well, suddenly the congressman from oshkosh is deciding cosmic issues, not just grain subsidies.
But hey, the entire EU is built around such nonrepresentative structures, and for that matter many European “democracies” have operated under this Roman, centralized model, even individually, so the bridge to complete travesty is shorter.
The erasure of distinction between those good and those evil is the primary goal of evil.
J.R. Nyquist puts forth a not so subtle hint at 0.
http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2009/1211.html
Sometimes Christians seem to think that nation states are bad, in the sense of impeding the peace and justice that all Christians seek. Hence some Christians (even Benedict in his recent encyclical) want to downplay the nation-state, and they hope for the emergence of some kind of supra-national governance.
St. Paul, however, did not repudiate the nation/empire or indicate that everyone deserved the same rights.
Maybe this is the point that Richard is making in his title.
via Wiki:
“‘Civis Romanus sum’ (pronounced Cīvis Rōmānus sum) (Latin meaning I am a Roman citizen) is a locution that indicated membership in Roman civilization and implied, in a wider sense, all the rights (and duties) associated with such a state (Cicero, In Verrem II.v.162).
“A phrase repeated with pride by many important Roman figures, it was put forward in order to assert the privileges granted to Roman citizens. Even prisoners were allowed to take advantage of that prerogative [i.e., if they were citizens], and subsequently they were granted favorable treatment. Paul of Tarsus, under trial and appealing to the Emperor, claimed his right as a citizen to be tried in Rome, and the judicial process was suspended until he, in chains and escorted by guards, was carried to the capital city (Acts 22, 27).
The record of the Nisei and of Americans of German and Italian descent in World War 2 at least suggests that national identity overcame, for the most part, any ethnic allegiances.
My dad was the son of a Pennsylvania German pharmacist who spoke the dialect (Pennsylfawnish Deitsch)then in wide use in my home county. His Army buddy was the son of an Italian immigrant, grew up in the Scranton area, and spoke Italian as fluently as he did English (invaluable during Mark Clark’s push toward Rome in 1944). What mattered more to the Southern guys in their outfit than their German or Italian ethnicity was their birth north of the Mason-Dixon line– i.e. they were “damn Yankees” first and fellow Americans second. There were still a few Civil War veterans around in the 1940s– a very few lived into the 1950s, so that war was still a living memory eighty years after Appomattox.
Re: Josh, #26
It also strikes me as the product one would expect of a mindset so thoroughly secularized in its outlook as that which dominates the Left.
The obvious downside to “kill[ing] enemies, quickly, openly, proudly, without regret” is the same argument often made against capital punishment: namely, that some innocents are also bound to get killed in the process, as cases of mistaken identity, collateral damage or what have you. Once upon a time this was considered an acceptable risk, for the simple reason that if you were in fact innocent, getting killed merely sped you on your way to your eternal reward in heaven – which also served as motivation for your surviving loved ones to carry on in the hopes of being reunited with you there someday.
Of course, none of this holds much water in a culture that doesn’t believe in (or at least doesn’t acknowledge or take into account) the existence of heaven or hell in the first place. By that outlook, death is the absolute end of one’s existence, and it follows that everyone experiences death the same way regardless of their innocence, “protection status” or lack thereof (i.e. with no salvation, damnation or anything else awaiting them on the other side). It also follows from this outlook that taking a human life is the absolute worst thing one human being can do to another, period. Since this secular outlook is part and parcel of the Western Leftist worldview, is it any wonder that they would be so squeamish about deadly force, be it in war, law enforcement, private self-defense or whatever?
I’d like to reiterate my Three Cities Axiom: Not until we have lost at least 3 cities will the U.S. ever get genuinely serious about islamist terrorism.
Until then, everything continues at the level of fatuousness.
LOTM @ 44: I would pick the following nit; If the stranger obeys the laws of the land, he’s protected and innocent until proven guilty. If he raises his hand against the nation, his status changes from stranger to enemy, thereby rendering trial unnecessary and a worrisome bother.
Joshua: I started to question the assertion of your second para, but it occurred to me that their attitude toward life is that it be useful and wanted by those in control. Therefore you are correct.
And with respect to the summary internment of the Nisei, what was wrong about it was that 1) they were citizens and due the protection of the law, 2) it was based on their race alone. On those two grounds alone, it was indefensible.
The comment above about the confusion in the Pacific theater is well taken and the European theater was the proper place for the 442nd.
The rights of aliens under U. S. law is a question that arises under current circumstances because liberal lawyers during the Bush adminisitration got federal courts to agree that fighting terrorists was a criminal, not a military action.
To raise the question as it has been raised in this thread is already to have granted that conclusion–else, why concern ourselves with the legal rights of citizens vs. non-citizens on the basis of allegiance or whatever?
A more fundamental and applicable discussion should be made on the matter of presumption of innocence which the terrorists in federal court will enjoy. The simple fact, as has already been outlined on Powerline recently, is that under certain conditions, including a hung jury, these people could walk out of court scot-free.
In criminal cases which deal with the truth of charges made about possible acts occurring in the past, the presumption is that nothing is known for certain until the evidence is “tried,” i.e., tested in an open forum. The NY court will in effect (as I understand it) be determining whether or not these people in fact committed the crimes which they have already in Gitmo confessed to committing. (Not to mention that clown Holder’s statement that if they are found innocent they still won’t be released, an admission that in little reduces the whole procedure to an illogical (and probably illegal) farce.
The liberals want this war brought under the ciminal system because it takes it out of the hands of a president who enjoys war powers under the constitution. I will not rehearse yet once again the notion that crimes that are “committed in the past” are absolutely distinct from wars, which are fought on the presumption that “in the future” declared enemies can be expected to strike blows against U. S. citizens, and therefore do not warrant protection by the principle of presumption of innocence. By their own admission in all wars, including this one, they are “always already guilty.”
So, it strikes me that the “allegiance” plus/minus “citizenship” issue is interesting but arguably not really the one that deals with what we are facing here. Andrew McCarthy–who I believe has never written something that is not straight-down-the-line on this subject–has put this whole thing as clearly as it can be put in his articles in the National Review and comments elsewhere. This is not criminal prosecution, this is war prosecution, and people will die because of the refusal of those in power to refuse to see the difference.
Smart terrorists say “Civis Obamus sum” to Holder and the NYT.
Riddle, #34 wrote, “… Internment that protected non-Nisei citizens from the actions of any (presumably few) traitorous Nisei and also protected the Nisei from the vigilante action that would have surely arisen after a traitorous incident…”
Good grounds to fear both situations had occurred by early 1942. In the fall of 1934, Navy Lt. (later RAdm) Edwin T. Layton, a Japanese-fluent intelligence officer, while in port at San Pedro CA was assigned to attend the showing of a newly arrived (on a Japanese tanker) propaganda film to hundreds of members of the Japanese Citizens Patriotic Society in a rented auditorium. Layton posed as a local fire inspector and enforced no-smoking rules during the film, which was indeed stridently pro-emperor and anti-American. Layton’s report went to fleet intelligence officer Joseph J. Rochefort (who later cracked the IJN code in time to affect the battle of Midway) and thence to US Fleet Commander Adm. J.M. Reeves.
In 1968, while stationed at NAF El Centro in the rich agriculture lands of SE California’s Imperial Valley, I was told by a long-term local resident who ran the Public Works Dept shops that after the Japanese invaded the Philippines in Dec 1941 and news of atrocities there had spread, local Japanese-ancestry farm workers were being found murdered by local Filipino farm workers, typically by throat-cutting, and separating those segments of the population seemed advisable.
Oh for Pete’s sake, the left (or “the liberals”, if we really must let them control terminology) are not doing this because they do not believe in The Almighty, or they want it out of the hands of the President because thy are pacifists, or a obsession with process or legalisms.
They are doing all because they side with Islam against the West. They see that both of them have the same enemy.
They certainly have no qualms about siding with murders like Castro, letting hundreds of thousands die under Saddam or supporting international gangsters like the PRC leadership. They attack the slightest dissent with the worst sort of character assassination, and it is only fear of reaction that keep them shooting dissenters in the street themselves, at least for the time being. Process? Law? They have shredded the Constitution.,
I cannot understand why folks here persist in thinking otherwise,
They are doing this to undermine the country. They wish to destroy America. They hate it. They hate us.
All of these other ratified parsings of their behaviors that somehow assume misguided good will on their part are asking the wrong questions and are woefully misdirected.
We have been through this so many times with the Democrats: The Cold War, Viet Nam, Israel and the Pali’s, Central America, South America, Christians in Beirut, Iran, the first Iraqi War, the WOT. My goodness, they were the party of slavery and the Confederacy.
Look at what they have done to our schools and our courts. This is an all out war against us, and anyone who is against us will get the cover and support of the American left through their agencies of the MSM, Academia, NGO’s, the Democrat party and the legal system.
They have to be called out and the whole vast mechanism destroyed.
That is it. There is nothing more too it.
16. WillDoMathForFood:
Nicely put and no wiggle room for the Left on that one, WDMFF
Joshua @ 49: I’m going to pass on the capital punishment, but regarding “collateral damage” – I believe it is by far the best thing if in going after terrorists, we do much more collateral damage, as policy. Everyone should know that a terrorist driving by endangers the entire area, and standing within 100 yards of one is risking your own life. Now, one can debate that, but that’s not the difficult point, the difficult point is when the terrorist uses that and intentionally goes and stands among unknowing innocents with the express intention of getting them killed by the other side.
I was just listening to someone on the radio claiming that many of the collateral deaths recently occurring in Afghanistan, are because the people know we do not ask for proof, so they claim collateral deaths when there are none – and McChrystal has changed the ROE, especially for air support, to try to reduce collateral deaths that are actually based in some large part on such fakery.
My latin isn’t up to it, but if they are “citizens of jihad” that should carry the negative privilege of being killed on identification, and in most cases taking everything within a 50 yard circle with them. I accept that policy is a blunt instrument, just as much as weaponry. I do not WANT it to be any finer, in case of war.
We do know that we once understood the differences between Public and Private War and knew how to deal with them. All the way through Lincoln if not Teddy Roosevelt, the basics of that thing that allows us to form society, the jus gentium, was known. From Bracton in the 13th century when looking at the English Common Law it is seen and given as that Law we create when we marry: it is the Law to have society and to protect others, and to allow society to look after our negative liberties so that we could thrive on the positive ones. But simple understanding of what separates the laws of man from the Law of Nature is now beyond us, and we now demean our creating of society so as to uphold the old law… the Law of Nature… and call it ‘good’. When we cannot distinguish between Public and Private War we then descend back to Nature of each for themselves and no society to be formed as it is always threatened by the individual.
Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln all knew about the Law of Nations, which is formed the moment we create society be putting the welfare of another ahead of our very own. No matter where man forms society, the Law of Nations appears: Inca, Aztec, Rome, Greece, Babylon, China, Egypt, Assyria, Lapland, India… it is invariant as to have society we must allow common oversight of our negative liberties so we do not lose society to them. Thus in Book III does de Vattel instantly begin with what is Public War:
Ҥ 1. Definition of war.(136)
WAR is that state in which we prosecute our right by force. We also understand, by this term, the act itself, or the manner of prosecuting our right by force: but it is more conformable to general usage, and more proper in a treatise on the law of war, to understand this term in the sense we have annexed to it.
§ 2. Public war.(136)
Public war is that which takes place between nations or sovereigns, and which is carried on in the name of the public power, and by its order. This is the war we are here to consider: — private war, or that which is carried on between private individuals, belongs to the law of nature properly so called.
[..]
§ 4. It belongs only to the sovereign power.(137)
As nature has given men no right to employ force, unless when it becomes necessary for self defence and the preservation of their rights (Book II. § 49, &c.), the inference is manifest, that, since the establishment of political societies, a right, so dangerous in its exercise, no longer remains with private persons except in those encounters where society cannot protect or defend them. In the bosom of society, the public authority decides all the disputes of the citizens, represses violence, and checks every attempt to do ourselves justice with our own hands. If a private person intends to prosecute his right against the subject of a foreign power, he may apply to the sovereign of his adversary, or to the magistrates invested with the public authority: and if he is denied justice by them, he must have recourse to his own sovereign, who is obliged to protect him. It would be too dangerous to allow every citizen the liberty of doing himself justice against foreigners; as, in that case, there would not be a single member of the state who might not involve it in war. And how could peace be preserved between nations, if it were in the power of every private individual to disturb it? A right of so momentous a nature, — the right of judging whether the nation has real grounds of complaint, whether she is authorized to employ force, and justifiable in taking up arms, whether prudence will admit of such a step, and whether the welfare of the state requires it, — that right, I say, can belong only to the body of the nation, or to the sovereign, her representative. It is doubtless one of those rights, without which there can be no salutary government, and which are therefore called rights of majesty (Book I. § 45).
Thus the sovereign power alone is possessed of authority to make war. But, as the different rights which constitute this power, originally resident in the body of the nation, may be separated or limited according to the will of the nation (Book I. § 31 and 45), it is from the particular constitution of each state, that we are to learn where the power resides, that is authorized to make war in the name of the society at large. The kings of England, whose power is in other respects so limited, have the right of making war and peace.1 Those of Sweden have lost it. The brilliant but ruinous exploits of Charles XII. sufficiently warranted the states of that kingdom to reserve to themselves a right of such importance to their safety.”
We lose our safety entire when we cannot distinguish between them, and yet that is exactly what those who are so enlightened as to be blinded by that light and rendered unable to see want. The grounds for distinction are given:
Ҥ 67. It is to be distinguished from informal and unlawful war.
Legitimate and formal warfare must be carefully distinguished from those illegitimate and informal wars, or rather predatory expeditions, undertaken either without lawful authority or without apparent cause, as likewise without the usual formalities, and solely with a view to plunder. Grotius relates several instances of the latter.5 Such were the enterprises of the grandes compagnies which had assembled in France during the wars with the English, — armies of banditti, who ranged about Europe, purely for spoil and plunder: such were the cruises of the buccaneers, without commission, and in time of peace; and such in general are the depredations of pirates. To the same class belong almost all the expeditions of the Barbary corsairs: though authorized by a sovereign, they are undertaken without any apparent cause, and from no other motive than the lust of plunder. These two species of war, I say, — the lawful and the illegitimate, — are to be carefully distinguished, as the effects and the rights arising from each are very different.
§ 68. Grounds of this distinction.
In order fully to conceive the grounds of this distinction, it is necessary to recollect the nature and object of lawful war. It is only as the last remedy against obstinate injustice that the law of nature allows of war. Hence arise the rights which it gives, as we shall explain in the sequel: hence, likewise, the rules to be observed in it. Since it is equally possible that either of the parties may have right on his side, — and since, in consequence of the independence of nations, that point is not to be decided by others (§ 40), — the condition of the two enemies is the same, while the war lasts. Thus, when a nation, or a sovereign, has declared war against another sovereign on account of a difference arisen between them, their war is what among nations is called a lawful and formal war; and its effects are, by the voluntary law of nations, the same on both sides, independently of the justice of the cause, as we shall more fully show in the sequel.6 Nothing of this kind is the case in an informal and illegitimate war, which is more properly called depredation. Undertaken without any right, without even an apparent cause, it can be productive of no lawful effect, nor give any right to the author of it. A nation attacked by such sort of enemies is not under any obligation to observe towards them the rules prescribed in formal warfare. She may treat them as robbers,(146a) The inhabitants of Geneva, after defeating the famous attempt to take their city by escalade,7 caused all the prisoners whom they took from the Savoyards on that occasion to be hanged up as robbers, who had come to attack them without cause and without a declaration of war. Nor were the Genevese censured for this proceeding, which would have been detested in a formal war.”
Our positive liberty of self-defense provides us with a way to address man returned to his animal state… and yet that is what those who are so enlightened want to deprive us of having. It is unfortunate we have forgotten about what allows us to create society.
Let us hope those that come after our demise as a civilization learn from our mistakes.
For we are on the path to oblivion by erasing the bounds of Nature upon us, so we can all be animals fully, again.
25. Sam Hall
The internment camps were no blot on our history at all, though my grandfather, an Irish born San Francisco Police Sergeant said going to their houses to pick them up was one of the hardest things he ever had to do. Most of them were peasants and so was he (in the nicest possible meaning of the word)and they understood each other.
I suggest, Mr Hall, that you read Michelle Malkin’s, “In Defense of Internment” ISBN0-89526-051-4. I assume you know she is a dink herself (genetically if not mentally, bless her for her outstanding atributes in both departments) and so might well have had a few racial tinged encounters in her life which makes her book all the more remarkbable to me.
There have been leftist/Democrat dominated propaganda exercises in the form of commissions and other investigatory actions that are all part of the same hate America set as we see in Obama, his unaccountable “czars” over the years but Malkin nails down the facts spectacularly well.
Consider her account, please. There’s no point in rehashing it here.
It was in the context of the times, with the Axis advancing everywhere and submarines off our coasts a reasonable precautionary measure.
LOTM
RE: Lev 19:33-34
7:1When Yahweh your God shall bring you into the land where you go to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before you, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than you; 7:2and when Yahweh your God shall deliver them up before you, and you shall strike them; then you shall utterly destroy them: you shall make no covenant with them, nor show mercy to them;
7:3neither shall you make marriages with them; your daughter you shall not give to his son, nor his daughter shall you take to your son.
7:5But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their engraved images with fire.
7:16You shall consume all the peoples who Yahweh your God shall deliver to you; your eye shall not pity them…
20:15Thus shall you do to all the cities which are very far off from you, which are not of the cities of these nations. 20:16But of the cities of these peoples, that Yahweh your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes; 20:17but you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; as Yahweh your God has commanded you…
W: “The need to treat everyone identically will — whatever its legal justification — lead to some bizarre and even absurd situations.”
Government force used in equalizing things which are self-evidently not equal is the irrational/unnatural essence of Marxism. The laboring, tax-paying middle class must be equalized in property ownership with the non-laboring, tax-eating proletariat class. The value of homosexuality must equal that of heterosexuality. The value of non-citizens enemies must equal the value of citizens. Ultimately Marxists believe the value of good must equal the value of evil; i.e.: they fail to acknowledge evil (particularly among themselves).
“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of “good” and “evil” as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter. Depending upon circumstances and the political situation, any act, including murder, even the killing of thousands, could be good or could be bad.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
http://www.alor.org/Library/LegacyofTerror.htm
Marxist ideals of forced equality can only be enforced by a government with totalitarian powers, and will thus inevitably lead to a totalitarian society. There is no “enlightened Marxism,” and the idea that there is has ruined more lives than probably and other ideology in modern history. Marxism is an organized crime against humanity.” Fjordman
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2125/print
W: “The need to treat everyone identically will — whatever its legal justification — lead to some bizarre and even absurd situations.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth… Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane… There will be no thought as we understand it now; orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think; orthodoxy is unconsciousness… The heresy of heresies was common sense.” George Orwell, 1984
The treatment of ordinary British citizens as terrorists, and the coddling (by PC and Multicultural demands) of Muslims and Muslim terrorists basically created the BNP as a serious political force and not a joke.
Contrary to Wretchard’s thesis, modern Western societies DO NOT treat all the same. BY LAW the “protected classes” get preferential, privileged treatment. BETTER than the mostly middle class, mostly (but not exclusively) White majority population. A Major Hassan can preach Jihad and killing and be ignored, indeed promoted upwards, while a White soldier must meet the highest levels of fitness and has no margin for error.
Indeed, what the Western nations practice is protection, legalistic to the extreme, for Muslim Jihadis (and non-White ordinary criminals) and full punishment with massive severity for the White majority population and middle class. A man in Muslim robes talking of jihad will be unmolested while native citizens of the White majority are harassed as terrorists for innocent activities.
How long can this go on in a decades long economic decline, with stagflation the best of the possible economic outcomes? Not very long I think.
Consider a BNP-led Britain. It would naturally expel all immigrants, particularly Muslim and Caribbean ones, cater to the White majority (at the expense of the non-White minority) and ignore (quite happily) cries of “racism.” It would have all the socialism of the multicultural with all the nationalism of the limited government adherents.
If those creating a two-tiered (White native majority treated like criminals, Muslim jihadis and non-White criminals treated with kid gloves, literally) system in the West wanted to deliberately create a BNP-type government across the West, they could not have done a better job. No people will sign up for what amounts to serfdom under foreign invaders as a “good deal” and will fight it with every thing they’ve got.
The majority go without protection (from terrorism) but are subject to the harshest of laws. The terrorists meanwhile (Muslim Jihadis) are allowed the fullest protection and are not expected to obey any laws. Lack of protection by the law for the majority leads the majority to have no confidence, or see any legitimacy, in the law and the authorities. It makes the authorities illegitimate and therefore utterly and totally replaceable. By the early 1770′s most Americans considered themselves loyal subjects of the Crown. By the late 1770′s they were in open revolt with perhaps a third finding the very concept of the Crown itself illegitimate. Loss of legitimacy can be very, very rapid.
Mongoose, #55: I cannot understand why folks here persist in thinking otherwise,
You go on to answer your own question below:
Look at what they have done to our schools and our courts. This is an all out war against us, and anyone who is against us will get the cover and support of the American left through their agencies of the MSM, Academia, NGO’s, the Democrat party and the legal system.
They have to be called out and the whole vast mechanism destroyed.
And there, as they say, is the rub. Even if we do manage to destroy the whole vast mechanism, in many ways that would just mean our problems are only beginning. To rebuild all those institutions would take years if not decades, and in the meantime America would be left without any functioning cultural, political or legal institutions at all. In other words, ripe for any old would-be despots to take power as long as they can restore some semblance of law and order. Life imitating V for Vendetta (or its backstory, at any rate).
So you see, it’s not that we don’t get that Leftists are at war with the West – it’s that we’d much rather confront them in a way that doesn’t involve destroying whatever remains of Western civilization in the process. That would defeat the purpose of confronting the Left in the first place, would it not?
63.Whiskey
“No people will sign up for what amounts to serfdom under foreign invaders as a “good deal” and will fight it with every thing they’ve got.”
The disarmed Poms haven’t got much to fight it with, Whiskey.
If I were an activist in the UK, I would be looking to the IRA for arms. My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
And I would be, in the first instance, looking for pistols to take down high priority targets in the streets.
Long arms come later.
Aw, you know we would have to “profile” if we were to separate the citizen from the non, and the evil from the good and the legal from the ill.
Some of my ancestors left Europe in the mid 1800′s to get away from the Prussian wars and all the crap that Europe retained. I have no illusions about the additional incentives there may have been to fight against that from which they were forced to flee.
many German and Italian POW’s were routinely quartered with American family’s all up and down the east coast at least. I cannot believe the opportunity or culture would lend itself to doing the same for Japanese soldiers.
#54. C. Greenlaw: Do you happen to know what the report stated about the reaction of the viewers or if any reaction could be discerned. That is a very interesting bit of history.
Wadeusaf
“They were asked to delete their pictures and, unaware that police have no authority to enforce this without a warrant, they complied. ”
It’s expecting too much to ask foreign guests to behave as arrogantly and confidently as the natives with respect to the limits of police power. Refusal and a little unwarranted jail time can ruin your whole holiday.
As Austrians and Europeans, the Soviet state with its crazy rules and demand for immediate submission seems natural to them. Of course they obeyed. They’re EUropeans.
Joshua@64 said:
it’s that we’d much rather confront them in a way that doesn’t involve destroying whatever remains of Western civilization in the process.
Good luck.
Of course that’s called “druthers” Comrade. For example, if I had mine, we’d not have to destroy the education system by eliminating tenure and outlawing teachers’ unions. How about we just ask them to teach an unbiased truth? Begging the question: Which part(s) of the public education system would you save, that don’t aid and abet the objectives of the Left? Just plant and equipment assets?
Within that framework, one can now substitute any government agenda at the local, state, regional, federal and/or internationl level. Given the Left is fully intent on destroying all of that you would choose to keep, what’s worth saving?
Wretchard,
As you point out, equating citizens with non-citizens/enemies, making acts of war into a criminal offenses corrupts the juducal system and makes mockery of US Law.
So mass-murdering KSM is merely a common criminal, entitled to all the protections afforded to US citizens. A US citizen, in a criminal trial deciding on a death sentence, is entitled to a jury of one’s peers. To meet that requirement, then we must:
a) seat at least one imported jihadi;
b) seat a jihadi-in-waiting from the NYC population;
c) seat a good taqqiya-practicing Muslim;
d) If no Muslims are seated, then granting the obviously needed change of venue to say peer-rich Dearborn.
Legal jury-nullification. What’s not to like?
From a civil liberties standpoint, that’s my biggest problem with trying all these enemy combatants in federal court. These judges are going to be under enormous pressure to ensure convictions, and given the high stakes, judges will grant leniency to the prosecution.
In order to be admissible at trial in federal court, evidence has to be obtained in a (mostly) legal manner. Much of the evidence against guys captured on the battlefield probably wasn’t obtained legally. If the judge is bending the rules of evidence to permit the prosecution to introduce illegally obtained evidence… there is absolutely no reason why these new lax evidence rules wouldn’t be used by the prosecution in other cases that aren’t terror related.
While many of those on this site are reflexively “pro-police” and “anti-accused,” they really need to stop and think about why it is that the cops aren’t allowed to use tainted evidence at trial. If the police can illegally bust down somebody’s door without a warrant and then use any evidence found at trial – there will be alot more doors busted down illegally in the future. These show trials by the DOJ can only hurt the civil liberties protection that we as citizens now enjoy under the law. I loathe everything about this mockery of justice.
Well buckets
You have just given a good reason no to try these people( the term people is used loosely) in Federal Court. Can anyone explain to me, without a lot of PC BS why these ” people” are in Federal Court and not a Military Tribunal? If one of these ” people” is Egyptian and Egypt will kill this ” person” if he is returned to them, why is their treatment of one of their own any concern of the USA? Oh wait I know the terriorist would rather live in the islands so who are we mo make one of them unhappy.
My whole problem with US law, as it has evolved over the years, is how it has lost its objectivity to the rule of law itself. I hate the notion that “better hundreds of guilty men go free than one innocent man be jailed.” Is that really better for society as a whole that hundreds of criminals are free to commit more crime than one man jailed wrongly, with the right of appeal to set it right no less? Without legitimate law we go back to anarchy. A lawyer’s first duty should be to the LAW, his client secondarily. (I know they teach otherwise at law school, I just do not agree.) Providing competent representation is not the same thing as getting an obviously guilty person set free on a technicality. Where people lose focus is- what about the victims, for who the justice is intended? Oops, sorry, you died in vain because someone forgot to dot an i. I would rather feel sorry for the few who get convicted accidentally than feel righteous about the thousands who are set free deliberately, yet wrongly often to prey again on society. I hope that was not too off-topic.
64. Joshua:
My hope is true competition, in the form of privately run schools where parents can vote with their dollars, will destroy the monopoly currently held by the public system. And I mean all parents, not just the ones who can afford paying for both private and public schools. The voucher system that D.C. public school system wants to end was working too well for the Teacher’s Unions.
After all, the internet with blogs like this one are changing the traditional media without destroying it. Do you agree?
Buckets @ 71.
Completely agree. The rules of evidence are there to protect citizens, not terrorists and not enemy combatants in a war. The whole point of declaring war is to change the circumstance of our rules of justice. War is not law enforcement. The rules of evidence cannot be reasonably applied in a foreign country on a battlefield. This situation is absurd.
There is not enough difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Until we remove all our troops from the middle-east and do something to solve our problems at home, our reputation in every country is ruined. If I could afford to go anywhere after the damage the neoconservative war/profit-mongers have done to our economy, I would definitely say I was from Canada. Both Democrats and Republicans have been ripping off the taxpayers, since way before I was born. The thing that worried me about Obama right from the beginning was his warlike and hawkish attitudes. We need to stop giving money to the military, and Obama never talked about that. I invite you to my website devoted to raising awareness on this puritan attack on freedom: http://pltcldscsn.blogspot.com/
David, you poor thing. Whatever kind of drugs are you on? Are you so concerned about our “reputation” amongst “every” country being “ruined”.
Our reputation amongst criminal, illegitimate regimes all over the world doesn’t matter. They hate us because of what we are.
And they want to kill us.
And you want to destroy the military.
And you are so embarrassed by the United States that you would deny being American.
You poor little girl.
Perhaps you should lift up your skirts and step daintily across the border to Canada. That’s where most of the other chickenshits ran when we declared independence from a foreign monarchy.
You silly little slave to chatter mind. What are you doing here? Stumble in by mistake.
Welcome to your nightmare, dearie.
77. Bob Murphy:
David Scott is just trying to promote his own blog (note plug at end of inane screed) by making statements that he must know runs counter to those who are frequent visitors here at BC. If only all the little leftards would simply move to countries they covet the US would be a better place. Maybe we could get some high profile lefties to start the trend.
Make a Difference! Move to (insert favorite socialist country here)! YES YOU CAN!
You’d be right, Speakeasy.
But if I ever do time I want him for a cellmate.:)
“Although it may seem worrisome that the principle of protection excludes some individuals from legal protection, this is precisely how the principle preserves both safety and civil liberty …”
or as grandma used to say… “it’s easier to wear slippers than to carpet the whole world.”