Well, at least at The Onion. You may have to watch it two or three times to get all the jokes in the crawl.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
Bringing Martial Law To America
That will be the result of this insane decision to try KSM in New York:
For over two hundred years we were careful to keep a firewall between civil and martial law. We did so because civil and martial law are polar opposites. Civil law is focused on protecting the rights of the accused against the overwhelming power of the state. When there is doubt, the accused walks free. Martial law is focused on imposing a minimal order on bloody chaos. It was focused on allowing the military to complete its mission and win wars. When there is doubt, the accused is presumed guilty.
Now, Obama wants to bring martial law into a civil court room in Manhattan. In order to let a civil conviction of KSM stand, the higher courts will have to overturn almost all the current constitutional protections of the accused.
They will have to overturn the requirement for Miranda warnings. They will have to overturn the Fifth Amendment protection against self incrimination. They will have to overturn the right to face one’s accusers and to examine all evidence and evidence gathering methods.
Even if the courts throw out his conviction, the government will never allow him to go free, so we will toss out protection against double jeopardy if they try to convict with a military tribunal, and toss out the right of no imprisonment without trial if they don’t.
Our system of justice relies on precedent and equality of procedure. The same rules apply to every civil trail. We can’t say that it’s okay to deny the right against self-incrimination in one person’s trial while saying it’s okay in another. If the courts overturn the rights of one individual accused, it must overturn the rights of all of them.
Nothing good will come of this trial.
Of course it will. It will show how evil the BusHitler was.
[Afternoon update]
Memo to Obama: these detainees are not soldiers in this war, they are the weapons.
[Update mid afternoon]
How hard will it be to convict KSM?
[Update late afternoon]
Here’s a hall of shame: the list of Senate Republicans who supported Eric Holder for Attorney General.
[Update a few minutes later]
Remember what KSM said after his capture: He would tell us everything when he got to New York for his trial. We told him: You’re not going to New York. First, you’re going to spend a little time talking to the CIA. And under CIA questioning, KSM — together with other CIA detainees — gave us vital intelligence that helped stop a number of attacks, including a plot to fly an airplane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles; a plot to fly airplanes in the Heathrow Airport and buildings in downtown London; a plot to blow up our consulate in Karachi; a plot to blow up our Marine camp in Djibouti; and many others. His interrogation produced thousands of intelligence reports, and helped us wrap up the two main terrorist networks still at large at the time of his capture: the remaining members of the KSM network that had planned the 9/11 attacks, and the key members of the Hambali network that was working with al-Qaeda on follow-on attacks.
Once we had exhausted KSM as an intelligence source, President Bush transferred him and 13 other detainees from CIA custody to Guantanamo Bay so that they could face justice. If it had not been for the legal obstacles Andy cites, their trials would have begun soon thereafter.
And had it not been for the Obama administration, KSM and his partners would now be sitting on death row. KSM and his co-conspirators offered to plead guilty once their military commissions got underway and proceed straight to execution — until the Obama administration suspended the proceedings. This means that, with his decision to give KSM a civilian trial, Eric Holder effectively rejected KSM’s guilty plea, and told him, “No, Mr. Mohammed, first let us give you that stage you wanted in New York to rally jihadists to kill Americans and incite new attacks.”
Thanks, Eric.
[Evening update]
The worse the terrorist, the more rights he gets. Great incentives, guys.
Setting It Up
…and knocking down a straw man, over at The Space Review, by Dr. Day:
Occasionally, space activists critical of NASA claim that whereas the civilian space agency is a badly-run bureaucracy that ought to be eliminated and replaced with something else, the military manages to do a much better job with its space program. The military, which they believe to be immune to congressional micromanagement and political interference, somehow manages to do great things in space.
Which “space activists critical of NASA”? With whom is he arguing? Can he name names? I wouldn’t claim that this argument has never been made, or that there aren’t people who hold such a view, but I’m not aware of any. It certainly isn’t representative of “space activists” in general. So I’m not sure what his point is. He then goes on to kick the straw out of the thing with a list of past and current DoD space (and other) procurement screwups, with which anyone who has been following things is quite familiar. And his conclusion?
By now you might have detected a common theme here: procurement of complex hardware is hard. Many projects are over-budget and behind schedule, not just at NASA, but everywhere.
Actually, that’s not the common theme that I detect. The common theme that I detect is that the government procurement system for space is seriously FUBAR, whether civil or military. One of the places that such cost and schedule problems aren’t the case (at least not to the huge degree that the government programs are) is SpaceX. Yes, things have taken longer than they hoped, and probably cost more, though we have less insight into that, because we don’t know what the original estimates were, but here’s the bottom line: they have mostly developed both a launch system and a pressurized return module, capable of carrying crew with the addition of life support and launch escape, for about a hundredth of the cost that NASA estimates it will take to develop Ares I alone. And what is the “uncommon” theme here? SpaceX is doing it with their own money, and not subject to government procurement rules and the dictates of porkmeisters on the Hill.
[Early afternoon update]
Clark Lindsey has further thoughts:
SBIRS and many such projects at least have the virtue of advancing the state of the art. ARES I retreats from the state of the art. Rather than building on lessons learned from the Shuttle and taking a step forward towards practical, low cost reusable space transport, Griffin backtracked the agency and led it down the Ares I dead end where no development path to lower cost space access exists. Furthermore, it was known from the start that Ares would be hugely expensive both to develop and to operate. It is just an added insult to the taxpayer that, on top of all that, Ares turned out to have several serious technical problems that resulted in delays and even more costs. Hanging around with a rough crowd offers no excuse for this miserable project.
Indeed.
Health Care
Where would meals be better and cheaper? A city where customers could choose between restaurants competing in a free market? Or a city where everyone was forced to buy all their meals at a few mafia-controlled restaurants?
Like the mafia, Congress wants to make you an offer you can’t refuse. At least the mafia doesn’t pretend that it’s acting for your own good.
Hey, it’s the Chicago Way.
The Purple Hearts Of Fort Hood
If we can’t be honest and realistic about the threat our civilization faces, we cannot win.
Return Of The PUMAs?
Have they been just dormant, and not dead?
If everything continues to align as it is now, a woman will indeed be President in 2012, be it Hillary or Sarah…and we will work our heart and souls out for her on the ground whichever one it is who takes on Dr. Utopia because we just can’t let this man have a second term.
They haven’t forgotten, and a lot of Democrats have started to figure out what they already knew about The One. It will be interesting.
I Thought It Was A Joke
…when I heard that the administration actually plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York criminal court. But it’s true. Tom Maguire is as flabbergasted as I am. And as the Powerline guys ask:
…suppose that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial results in an acquittal or a hung jury. Would the Obama administration really let him go? If so, they are crazy. If not, why are they holding the trial?
It’s a show trial. There are regimes that have show trials. They don’t tend to be democratic.
And will evidence from his own testimony be excluded, seeing as how it was obtained under “torture”?
Madness.
[Update a few minutes later]
Andy McCarthy is appalled as well:
We are now going to have a trial that never had to happen for defendants who have no defense. And when defendants have no defense for their own actions, there is only one thing for their lawyers to do: put the government on trial in hopes of getting the jury (and the media) spun up over government errors, abuses and incompetence. That is what is going to happen in the trial of KSM et al. It will be a soapbox for al-Qaeda’s case against America. Since that will be their “defense,” the defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and — depending on what judge catches the case — they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets. And the circus will be played out for all to see — in the middle of the war. It will provide endless fodder for the transnational Left to press its case that actions taken in America’s defense are violations of international law that must be addressed by foreign courts. And the intelligence bounty will make our enemies more efficient at killing us.
Hey, but other than that, it’s a great idea.
[Update a few minutes later]
Who are they going to find willing to sit on that jury? I sure as hell wouldn’t. No civilian should be expected to. How are they going to find anyone impartial, particularly in that location? I predict, at a minimum, their attorney will petition for change of venue, because he can’t get a fair trial in New York. Just watch.
[Afternoon update]
Why bring KSM to the US? A question by Congressman Hoekstra.
None Of The Above, Continued
That remains my choice among NASA’s heavy-lift options. Doing a new Saturn V seems particularly crazy to me.
[Update a few minutes later]
More over at the Orlando Sentinel space blog. It’s an interesting point that one of the (many) issues with solids is that they are a lot harder to transport to the pad. And I don’t think that the human spaceflight program should be held hostage to the Pentagon’s need to keep ATK in business for military solid work. If it’s important to national security to have a solid manufacturer available, then let them pay for it, instead of perverting NASA’s launch systems and budget.
Creating A Permanent Underclass
Explaining Away Mass Murder
Charles Krauthammer, on the deulsional and suicidal impulse of the media in its aversion to ever associate terrorism with Islam.