What Direction Syria?

As the tidal wave that is the Middle East Revolutions swept into Syria last week, many in the West began to ask whether this foretells the end of the Assad dynasty.  The present ruler’s father Hafez al Assad took control of Syria in 1969 in a military coup, imposing martial law under an emergency decree that has never been lifted.  His son, Bashar, a English trained dentist, has shown little desire to change the repressive tactics of his father and has followed the same anti- Zionist anti Western policies.

And why not?  The policies worked.  Maintaining an outside enemy who threatened the country with annihilation was the stock in trade of both Assads and has ensured the longevity of their minority Allawite rule.

But the risings in Daara, unthinkable a few months ago, have put the regime on notice.  The repressive tactics that resulted in the slaughter of 10,000 Shiites in Hama in 1982 and the fear ofthe the long arm Syrian Secret Service, may no longer be enough to bottle the curdling hatred of the regime.  Assad has already been seen making economic and social concessions to the demonstrators in an effort to avoid the fate of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Ben Ali in Tunisia.

It is probably too little, too late.  The momentum of change in the Middle East is running against him and the present occupant of the Syrian presidency  may not have the wit nor the cunning his father might have mustered to avert a coming disaster.

Meanwhile the West cannot afford to ignore the unfolding Syrian drama.  Consumed with assault on the Ghaddafi regime in Libya, it will lose a vital opportunity if it does not come to the aid of the Syrian opposition.   Syria holds the key to much of the instability inthe Middle East.  Its sponsorship of Hezbollah in Lebanon ( which has reduced that state to practical vassalage);  its alliance with Iran which is a constant threat to a nascent Iraqi democratic state and its willingness to house exiled Palestinian leaders, places it front and center in the struggle to defeat terrorists and their state sponsors.

A Syria free of the crushing dictatorship that has rul the past ed it for the  past 42 years may not suddenly become a Western ally.  But the success of  a rebellion against the Assad regime will send a voluble message to other dictatorships that change, supported, if not led by the West, was not just a fluke in Libya and Egypt and may be coming their way.

Peter King’s Valuable Investigations

The new Chairman of Homeland Security, Peter King, has begun an overdue investigation into radicalization among America’s Muslims. For years, reporters, journalists and authors have been warning us about the increasing dangers we face from a home-grown jihad that is both nurtured and protected by an overweening political correctness which has brooked no opposition. Yet investigators such as Steve Emerson ( The Investigative Project); Robert Spencer ( JIHAD WATCH) and David Gaubatz ( author of Muslim Mafia) have made the case over and over again that there are some very serious problems emanating from the Muslim community in this country which go largely unaddressed because of fears of provoking charges of religious intolerance. Finally this ridiculous taboo has been jettisoned and our political leaders are beginning to act like grown ups who recognize they are faced with a serious internal dilemma that is not going to be dealt with by the expression of pieties about multicultural sensitivities.

The escalation of Islamic inspired attacks on American soil since 9/11( with over 30 attacks committed or foiled in the intervening ten years) should have been cause enough for several such inquiries.

Movies such as The Third Jihad and Homegrown Terrorism have given us plenty of cause for thought. Peter King is translating that thought now into action. Lets hope that political correctness does not inhibit further development of these important investigations into the problems lurking within our Muslim communities.

 

Guantanomo Has the Last Laugh

So there was the new president, two days following  his historic  inauguration, signing into law the order to close the Guantanomo Bay prison, ensuring that his administration, in contrast to his predecessor’s, would “ restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great even in the midst of war, even in dealing with terrorism.”

A certain euphoria accompanied the signing of  the three executive orders that day – given that they fulfilled a heavily peddled campaign promise. Obama was giving notice that the new administration would no longer sanction indefinite detention of foreign nationals without trial and that the torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration, which had left an indelible stain on the nation, would be expunged.

It was of course a great deal easier to sign that executive order than it was to actually close down the prison.  For two years the administration has embarrassingly attempted to find a solution to the most obvious and glaring question posed by the potential closure:  where to put the prisoners.  According to every report and inquiry received by the new administration these guys were dangerous – lethally so – and no state in the Union seemed overly eager to receive them.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcement on November 13, 2009 that five of the Guantanomo inmates, including 9/11 mastermind Khald Sheikh Mohammed, would be remanded to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for trial raised an outcry from that city and across the nation. Exactly one year later when Ahmed Ghailani, tried on 280 counts of murder and conspiracy to murder in the Kobar Towers attack in 1998 was acquitted of all but one of the charges leveled against him, the Administration began to see how bad things could go.   “Imagine,” they must have said to themselves, “if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was able to walk free because of a technicality – what would it do to us and our reputation?”

In December 2010,  Congress answered that question for them. On December 22nd  it passed legislation effectively barring transfer of detainees to the U.S.  for trial.

And so now, after twenty-two months of twiddling thumbs and attempting to find an answer to the increasingly intractable problem, the Obama Administration has not only decided to keep Guantanomo open, but is now resorting to the Bush inspired decision of trying them there in military tribunals.

So the Gulag remains and the Bush era policies for detaining terrorists and trying them as prisoners of war are essentially retained.

Such sloppy, unsophisticated policy making deserves the ridicule with which the Administration is now being lacerated.  Obama is learning the hard way that it is far easier to make election promises that obtain great political mileage than it is to fulfill them – particularly when absolutely no thought has been given to how to do so.

He might be finally appreciating that the man and administration he has spent four years vilifying might actually have got it right – a lesson history could soon also be teaching many Americans – grown nostalgic for the good old days of decisive leadership.

Death in Tucson

As six people lay dead and dying – and 13 others wounded – in a Walmart  Supermarket parking lot in Tuscon on Sunday, the knives were already being sharpened by both liberals and conservatives decrying the social environment that could have produced such senseless murders.

Liberals have attempted to implicate the Tea Party movement, pointing to Sarah Palin’s mid-term election campaign which targeted certain Democratic law makers with the image of a bulls eye – among them  Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.  The New York Times’  Paul Krugman amplified this and  was the first out of the gate:

” We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was. She’s been the target of violence before. And for those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target, the answer is that she’s a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist.

The above paragraph was written by a Nobel Laureate,  an economist whose exactitude in presenting data to buttress his arguments is legion.

Why, then, wouldn’t he be just as concerned with verifying facts before making wild guesses about such a pointless tragedy?  The truth is that neither Krugman nor the New York Times may be as concerned with ascertaining the facts as with obtaining mileage for an anti- conservative cause.  For no matter who Jared Lee Loughner eventually turns out to be, the dead in Tuscon deserve much more than being transformed into martyrs for a cause, which they certainly are not.

Daily Blurb #2

The Shame of President Moshe Katzav

I first met Moshe Katzav 20 years ago when I shepherded him around Los Angeles for the Israel Bonds organization. He  was then a minister in the Shamir Government and a very high ranking member of the Likud Party.   He struck me as a soft spoken and particularly decent man who was still filled to the brim with Zionist idealism.  I wasn’t then surprised when he was chosen over several other candidates to become Israel’s eighth president in 2002.  His personality and demeanor – restrained, humble and avuncular, seemed to fit the job description and matched the dignified air of  many of his predecessors.

How shocking it is then to witness his fall from grace and the revelations of his consistent pattern of womanizing and sexual harassment over the course of many years.  His conviction two days ago in a Tel Aviv court on charges of rape and sexual harassment brings unparalleled disgrace to the institution of the presidency, an office whose occupants have usually been considered beyond reproach.  Certainly Katzav’s predecessor, Ezer Weizmann, did great injury to the office when he was forced to resign over corruption charges dating back to his own time as a party politician.

But there has never been anything in Israel quite like this.  It says a great deal about the quality of the men who lead the Jewish nation when so many of them are unable to exhibit sexual restraint – and I include Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Mordechai- all well known womanizers, in that category.  It is a statement of profound sorrow that there is such little regard for dignified conduct among those men who regularly proclaim the Jewish people ” a light unto the world.”

The Future of Guantanomo

Karl Rove provided a particularly biting response in the WSJ to Barack Obama’s statement on December 22 that the prison facility on the Cuban coast is  “probably the No. 1 recruitment tool for al Qaeda and its affiliates.”  Rove rips into that assertion by producing abundant evidence, drawn from al Qaeda’s own communications,  that Guantanomo barely registers as a blip on the terror organization’s radar. ” Far more numerous and more extensive in these documents, ” Rove writes, ” are complaints about the existence of Israel, the U.S. military presence in the Middle East, Western notions of democracy and freedom, Western culture, and the fact that al Qaeda’s leaders see America as the obstacle to their achieving a restoration of the Golden Age of Islam.”

Obama’s own deadline for closing the facility passed nearly twelve months ago and the matter is obviously weighing on his mind.  The trouble is that neither he, nor anyone else in his administration has come up with an adequate replacement for the facility. No other country wants the inmates and the temptation to try all of them in American civil courts is fraught with the danger of clever lawyers securing hung juries on technicalities.   Beyond that, of course, is the absolute lie that Guantanomo exists as some kind of gulag where prisoners are systematically humiliated and deprived of basic human rights.  Marc A. Thiessen quite adequately dispatched this notion in his impressively well researched book Courting Disaster:  How the CIA Kept America Safe , an argument for the Bush Administration’s  terrorist detention policies which has received no  rebuttal by the liberal press.

As the months pass, it seems clear that the Bush detention policies are being vindicated because there are no adequate alternatives.  Perhaps this realization will also drive home the awareness of the seriousness of the threat the Bush Administration once faced from terror operatives and the continuing seriousness in which any American administration must perceive that challenge.

The Weather

Los Angeles is poised to experience the wettest winter in its history;  Blizzards, some of the worst in living memory, have shut down flights throughout the East Coast of the United States; Heathrow Airport in the U.K., the busiest airport hub in the world, was forced to shut down for three days as passengers curled up on terminal floors awaiting rescheduled flights; in Australia half of the State of Queensland – an area the size of Germany and France combined – is under water, experiencing the wost flooding the country’s history.  Everywhere you look this winter there are record freezing temperatures, incessant rain and tales of tragedy from an inclemency that shows little sign of abating.

Is the weather  itself then answering the question of global warming?   Well, it depends who you ask.   Most climatologists still maintain that there is a global warming trend of about 1 degree celsius over the past 150 years.   But that this is tied to natural activity in the sun and its own cycles and that the earth regularly passes through warming phases which have nothing to do with human activity.  There are others, of course, who declare that the frigid weather around the world is actual evidence of global warming since warmer ocean currents, caused by the melting of the polar ice caps,  force colder air into the atmosphere which leads to condensation and storms.  The National Wildlife Federation has even gone so far to state in a recent report that the world is experiencing milder winters, which is a result, naturally, of global warming

Pat Michaels, a climatologist and senior fellow at the Cato Institute  doesn’t think so.  ” You can make up any analogy you want, but the fact is that computer models don’t show such change , ”   “It is,”  said Michaels,  “the core problem of climatology:  It is attempting to explain everything even when everything becomes contradictory.”  Myron Ebell, director of the Center of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute adds: ” They make this stuff up as they go along,”

What the current global weather patterns place in evidence is the fact that if  the weather is notoriously difficult for computer models  to predict,  then our future climate may be as well.   The hubris of the scientists at the IPCC ( Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and Al Gore and his acolytes aside, it might be time to admit that in fact there is a substantial debate on this issue and that both science and the world’s population in general could substantially benefit from its broader exploration.

Remembering Bush’s “Gulag” and Policies of Torture

The Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten found an appropriate way to commemorate the ninth anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday.  In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, titled A Post- 9/11 Betrayal Endures, Rutten wasted little time in inveighing against the actual murderers of 3,000 Americans and the heinous ideology that brought about their deaths on that clear September morning.

Instead Rutten filled the space identifying the true villains of the 9/11 era -  the Bush Administration with its establishment of the Guantanomo “Gulag” and its sanctioning of policies of torture.

“  The story of how the Bush- Cheney administration rushed to make torture an instrument of national policy in its ” war on terror” and how it created an international gulag in which to abuse prisoners is well known.,  Less remarked on  – for reasons that do nobody credit – is the fact that President Obama and his administration have embraced the secrecy and usurpations of power that made possible the Bush- Cheney betrayal of American values.”

It is  convenient, I suppose, for a mudslinger such as  Rutten to reach for  the nearest accessible clump of vitriol and fling it for all its worth at Bush’s historical record.  Leftists such as this old curmudgeon still believe that there is mileage to be pumped out of flaying the previous Administration, certain it will expiate the country of its lingering sins.

I wonder if he has ever considered that the succeeding Obama Administration kept much of the Bush anti- terror campaign in place because it found that not only was it legal,  but also extraordinarily effective.

The fact is that the CIA interrogation program at Guantanomo did not inflict torture by any reasonable standard  – whether that of the Geneva Convention, the guidelines set by the European Court of Human Rights or American Law.   The only instance in which torture, as it is defined internationally, could possibly be said to have taken place was in the water boarding of three high level al Qaeda operatives.

But water boarding in itself is not illegal under American law.  The report of the CIA Inspector General found that ” on 29 July 2003 , the Agency secured Department of Justice concurrence on water boarding.” The interrogators checked to see that it was legal – and it was.  The Obama Administration has not brought any prosecutions against either the Department of Justice officials who approved the water boarding, nor against those CIA agents who administered it, precisely because they know that no case against them could succeed in any American court of law.

We can also not ignore that the water boarding  of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, produced such a rich trove of intelligence that it is rightfully credited as having averted the next 9/11.   By the time his interrogators had finished with him, Mohammed was spilling the beans, without much prompting from his interlocutors, on al Qaeda’s operational structure, its financing,  its communications and its logistics  – giving rise, in the process, to over 6,000 intelligence reports.

He identified al Qaeda travel routes and safe havens, and helped intelligence officers make sense of documents and travel records seized in terrorist raids.   This invaluable information was used by British officials in August, 2006 to interdict a plot of  two dozen terrorists to blow up seven trans-Atlantic flights , scheduled to depart Heathrow within hours of each other.

And what of Guantonomo itself ?  Can it really be compared to a Gulag -  the Soviet penal labor camp system that has become historically synonymous with the very concept of Hell ?

Well lets see:   Between 1929 and 1953  more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag with a further 6 to 7 million being deported and exiled to remote areas of the USSR.  According to a 1993 study of  archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953. More complete data puts the death toll for this same time period at 1,258,537, with an estimated 1.6 million casualties from 1929 to 1953.  These estimates exclude those who died shortly after their release but whose death resulted from the harsh treatment in the camps, which was a common practice.  The total population of the camps varied from 510,307 (in 1934) to 1,727,970 (in 1953).

Although conditions varied from camp to camp and place to place, the large majority of prisoners at most times faced meagre food rations, inadequate clothing, overcrowding, poorly insulated housing, poor hygiene, and inadequate health care. The overwhelming majority of prisoners were compelled to perform harsh physical labor. In most periods and economic branches, the degree of mechanization of work processes was significantly lower than in the civilian industry: tools were often primitive and machinery, if existent, short in supply. Officially established work hours were in most periods longer and days off were fewer than for civilian workers.  Often official work time regulations were extended by local camp administrators.

This is how Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archepeligo described his camp:

“Philosophers, psychologists, doctors, writers could have observed in our camps more than in anywhere else in all the versatility and in full details the specific process of narrowing of man’s mental and intellectual horizon, decline of a man to the level of an animal and his process of dying alive.”

This , on the other hand, is how  Guantanomo was described by Judy Reiss, whose son Joshua was killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11, described the detention facility.  Reiss had opposed the Iraq War and was appalled by stories of abuse at Guantanomo:

” I expected it to look like a broken down prison, like I had heard in the news.  But let me tell you, its the Guantanomo Bay Resort and Spa.   If they even have a pimple, they will fly a dermatologists down to make sure its not cancer.  They can stop the court proceedings if they need to pray.  They eat a more varied and selective diet than either you or I.”

Indeed, they do. According to Marc A. Thiessen, author of  Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe, at one time the military spent $125,000 on baklava to feed the prisoners on each night of Ramadan.  The chef in charge of catering showed Thiessen how she prepared exotic Middle Eastern meals according to the Middle East standard of halal.  Each meal is prepared in a variety of ways to satisfy the dietary restrictions of the inmates – ” regular meal”, soft meal”, ” high fiber meal,” vegetarian meal” , vegetarian meal with fish”  and ” bland meal”.  One nurse told Thiessen that  “the biggest problem the terrorists face is from excessive consumption of food on their 6,500 calories per day diet.”

To stay in shape and avoid this ” Gitmo gut,” the prisoners have access to elliptical trainers. They can view  satellite television, with access to al -Jazeera and Arabic news and sports channels.   They receive language and art classes – and handheld video games in order to help them pass the time.

An independent review by Navy Inspector General Admiral Albert T. Church III  found that:

” Detainees wee more likely to suffer injury from playing soccer or volleyball during recreation periods than from interactions with interrogators or guards.  Almost without exception, therefore, GTMO detainers have been treated humanely.”

Why is none of this information more popularly known?   Why does  ” Gitmo” still maintain  such a hold  on the national consciousness as a place where American values were betrayed – as indelibly imprinted as the attacks of 9/ 11 themselves.

Clearly there is still much political juice to be squeezed from the indictment and even today, as Rutten so ably demonstrates, it makes good copy.

One can only wonder what the reaction of readers  would have been in the decade following the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941, that the only thing a commentator could recall was how unlawfully we treated the men responsible for the attack.

But those who still remember that it was not the U.S. Government that sent 19 young men on planes on that September morning to kill thousands of innocent Americans, but Islamists driven by a deep hatred for our values and ideals, will regard journalists such as Rutten for what they are -malcontents, more committed to nursing a  sense of grievance against the United States ( of whatever administration) and identifying Americans’  “malevolent impulses”,  than true pride and gratitude for the achievements of its government over nine difficult  years in keeping Americans safe.

Oklahoma City, Columbine and Waco in Popular Memory

What image comes to your mind when you think of the Oklahoma City bombing ?  

 The destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah  Federal Building on April 19, 1995, in which 168 people lost their lives and hundereds were injured  seems to have paled in significance in the shadow of the much larger and more historic events in New York  City six-and-a-half years later.    The memory has faded, but not simply as a result of  the passage of  time.  It is because it is far easier to picture outsiders conducting such a heinous attack upon American individuals than  it is to consider them perpetrated by home born citizens.

That it was indeed an American who set the fuse which brought down the building and damaged 384 others in the immediate vicinity, is still hard for many to fathom.   Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nicols may have been very disturbed young men with wildly grandisose projections of themselves as true patriots, but they had nonetheless served in the armed forces and at one time lived fairly normal suburban lives with loving families.

How does it happen that someone grows up to be Timothy McVeigh?  The same question can be asked about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold  the eighteen- year-olds who eleven years ago in this same week, ran amock at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado killing 12 students and injuring six before killing themselves.

And seven years before them, the seige of the Branch Davidian sect at Waco, Texas had ended in tragedy after a 51 day seige resulting in all 75 inmates of the compound dying in a conflagration ordered by the sect’s leader, David Koresh.

All three events are inextricably linked.  McVeigh fixed on the date of April 19 to commemorate the Waco seige.   At his trial, he wanted his attorney, Stephen Jones, to present a “necessity defense”—which would have argued that he was in “imminent danger” and that his bombing was intended to prevent future crimes by the government, “such as the Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents. ”

A journal found in Harris’ bedroom described events such as the Oklahoma City bombing and  Waco, and noted  how the two wished to “outdo” these atrocities, focusing especially on what Timothy McVeigh had accomplished in Oklahoma City.

In the six years which separated these three events, the media became rife with speculation about a home grown far right wing conspiracy which had taken hold of  a sector of the U.S. population.  It is alleged that many nascent  plots were hatched and then foiled before they occured.  But no united conspiracy was ever discovered and there has been no other events quite like them since.

What then inspired these men and teenagers to wreak such damage and permanently affect the lives of hundreds of people?   Both Harris and Kelobold, unhappy and unpopular young men, had mentioned how they wanted to leave a lasting impression on the world through violence.  The disaffected McVeigh wanted to change history and to make a statement through an act of political theater.  David Koresh claimed that he was the new King Cyrus and a Messiah to boot.

In all of them a malignant narcissism reigned, encouraged and inflamed by local circumstances and popular culture, but in the end, operating as a  fatal personality disorder that led to the slaughter of innocent Americans in the name of a higher good.

There was, then, no conspiracy, no ideology and no political platform that linked these three crimes.  What linked them was a depserate need for attention that could only be satiated by a spectacular act of destruction. 

As we remember these tragic events today and seek to explain them to ourselves we should not forget that, yes, all the perpetrators were Americans.  But first and foremost  they were highly distrubed and disaffected human beings, for whom violence became a key to opening the door to everlasting fame and attention.

The Volunteer Attorneys

The battle over the attorneys continues.  First the Bush administration fired nine Justice Department attorneys in December, 2006 occasioning a Congressional investigation of Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales’ conduct and resulting, a year later, in his resignation.  Then the Obama administration launched an investigation into the conduct of Legal Counsel to the President’s office, helmed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee to determine the extent of their liability for giving legal sanction to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.  Unlike Gonzales, Yoo and Bybee emerged innocent of all charges, even if they were badly singed by the process. 

Now its the Republicans’ turn.  In his book Courting Disaster, former  Department of Defense speech writer Marc Thiessen devoted an extensive chapter to the way in which several Obama appointees to the Justice Department had voluntarily defended Guantanomo Bay detainees.  U.S. justice calls for every man to have his innocence defended in court by legal counsel and indeed our courts are mandated to appoint  legal counsel where the accused has not elected to defend himself .    But should those who have volunteered to represent the enemies of the state be serving in our own Department of Justice? 

That is the volatile question posed by Keep America Safe, an organization co-founded by Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.  In an advertisement distributed through YouTube, Cheney demands that  Attorney-General Eric Holder identify the seven Department of Justice attorneys who once served as voluntary counsel for the Guantanomo Bay al Qaeda inmates.  Should Holder be forced to disclose those names and why is it important? 

The Wall Street Journal Weekend Journal posed that very question two attorneys who should know something about the issue.  Steve Jones was the Oklahoma City based attorney who defended Timothy McVeigh after his arrest in 1996 on charges of planning the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City.  Andrew C. Mc Carthy was the lead federal prosecutor of the plotters of the World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993. 

Jones leads off with a case for attorneys who defend unpopular clients.  He  states that it has long been the position of American system of justice to offer a defense of criminals who our system labels innocent until proven guilty.  John Adams defended British soldiers accused of shooting several Boston’s citizens in 1770 and suffered public opprobrium for doing so.  But that did not stop him from becoming our second president. 

As an attorney Abraham Lincoln also took up unpopular causes, as did many of our distinguished federal judges.  Jones concludes that “neither history nor experience demonstrates that the points being made by Ms. Cheney and her allies have any merit.  They merely represent “forensic vigilantism,” and “a political lynch mob mentality.” 

Not so, says McCarthy.   It is not an American tradition for U.S. attorneys to volunteer to represent enemies of the state, but rather a modern anomaly.  The prisoners at Guantanomo Bay, were not U.S. citizens who had been deprived of their right to habeas corpus but unprivileged, alien enemy combatants.   U.S. law has also not traditionally extended the right of legal counsel in habeas corpus cases, even to U.S. citizens – and until 2004, enemy prisoners were not entitled to challenge their detention at all.  Moreover, he defends the Keep America Safe advertisement in its insistence that when attorney volunteer to participate in cases, where there is no requirement of representation of legal counsel, that choice likely reflects their policy preferences.  

On balance, Jones’ case comes out as unconvincing.   It fails to answer the question of how the American public should regard those who voluntarily (rather than as draftees, as he was) defend non-citizen enemies of the state and whether it has a right to have the political orientation and policy biases exposed through a demonstration of their choices. 

There is almost no question that at a time of grave national security risk (or war, as Mc Carthy calls it), the country’s legal team should be composed of individuals, who, at the very least, place the country’s security first and individual human rights in only a secondary position.  For as the John Yoo episode well demonstrated, we rely upon these attorneys for the legal justification of our national security policy.  If their position is that the individual rights of terrorists trumps the need for the American public to be protected, then we should demand their resignation. 

In the end, this debate exemplifies the struggle between the exigencies of national defense on the one hand and the rights of individuals to privacy and protection on the other.  In another sense it also illustrates the battle between those who reject American particularism, which requires that American law apply to just Americans  – and those who support the notion that American protections and privileges should have universal application.    

Does the decision of the so called ‘al- Qaeda Seven’ to defend non-citizen enemy combatants make them, ipso facto, supporters of al Qaeda’s ideology?  Of course not.  But equally it does not makes them heroes of conscience whom we should reward with employment in an important national office tasked with responsibility for our safety and well being.

Israel Does the West’s Dirty Work

The outrage in Britain that has followed the revelation that eleven Israelis, traveling under false British passports, executed a Hamas mastermind in Dubai last month, is a wonder to behold.    Prime Minister Gordon Brown has sputtered that Israel has questions to answer about the theft of the passports.  The British foreign secretary, David Millband, has gone on record threatening to sever ties with the Mossad.  Opposition leader David Cameron, together with his shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, are demanding an inquiry. And the British press is howling for retribution. 

The British establishment has made it clear that it has very little interest in the maintenance of  Israeli security.  But does it have any real interest in the maintenance of its own? .  Just this week, the second most senior justice in  the country exposed   the workings of  Britain’s own intelligence network and its link with the Americans, when he excoriated the agency for its handling of the ex-Guantanomo inmate Binyam Mohamed, severely compromising MI5’s ability to work in concert with foreign intelligence services; Lax British immigration policies, its ludicrously benevolent welfare system and an insistence of the right of free speech for even those who preach the overthrow of the British government and the destruction of the West, has transformed London into “terrorist central”  and a major node for the financing of terrorist activity world wide.

You’ll notice though that none of the British protests actually involve a denial that Mahmoud al Mabhouh was an innocent.  That is because the British government is well aware  that the Israelis bumped off a dangerous guy, a weapons purchaser and smuggler, whose activities have caused hundreds of Israeli deaths and injuries over the past 15 years. He trafficked in death and knew the risks of doing so. 

Lets also not forget that the British government and public are  no strangers to extra-judicial killings by British agents.  Countless works of  British fiction, from the 1840s and the Great Game onward, have been based on real life British spies knocking off villains who threaten British security in places as distant as Singapore, Kabul and Kenya. 

Today, however, we live in a different world, where terrorists use technology to network with one another and share their own forms of intelligence.  Hamas is a vital part of this network and no one should think for a moment that it does not have its own operatives in the U.K. supporting the financing  and coordination of military operations in Gaza and Damascus.  When are the British elites going to understand that this worldwide terrorist network, is poised as much at the heart of Britain as it is against the United States  and Israel?   Will it ever appreciate that those countries’ enemies  are as much their own  as any?

 Mahmoud al Mahbouh  stood as much  a  threat to  British security as it does to Israel’s. Rather than lambasting that country for its impudent use of British passports, it should be expressing its gratitude, much as it should have following the Entebbe Raid in 1976 and the Iraq’s Osirak Reactor Raid in 1981.   As a Western democracy, the Israelis demonstrated that they will not sit by idly, lugubriously building legal justifications for intervention, while terrorists plot and plan the murder their citizens.