Obama vs. Cheney vs. a Darker Reality

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

In an address given at the National Archives, President Barrack Obama, his back to America’s founding documents, affirmed his dedication to the proposition that the U.S. Constitution is a suicide pact:

…whenever feasible, we will try those who have violated American criminal laws in federal courts -- courts provided for by the United States Constitution. Some have derided our federal courts as incapable of handling the trials of terrorists. They are wrong. Our courts and our juries, our citizens, are tough enough to convict terrorists.

No sane American questions a court or jury’s ability to try criminal cases. Sane individuals, however, rightly question the ability of judges and lawyers to fight and win on the battlefield, which on 9/11 happened to be in the streets of New York City, Washington, D.C. and a field in Pennsylvania. Where were the black-robbed high priests of the bench or the briefcase-totting members of the bar? In secure locations, no doubt.

Recent Supreme Court decisions, according stateless terrorists protections under the Geneva Convention, elevated the station of Islamic serial mass-murders to that of national uniformed soldiers, single-handedly undermining the President’s ability to wage war while rendering meaningless the protections of legitimate prisoners of war. After all, has any high-level al Qaeda prisoner been charged with war crimes for beheading their “prisoners” or ordering the suicide bombing of civilian targets?

While President Obama castigated the Bush administration for prosecuting the war on terror with blunt force in place of empty bumper sticker platitudes, former Vice President Dick Cheney issued a rebuttal from a podium at the American Enterprise Institute:

In the category of euphemism, the prizewinning entry would be a recent editorial in a familiar newspaper that referred to terrorists we've captured as, quote, ‘abducted.’ Here we have ruthless enemies of this country, stopped in their tracks by brave operatives in the service of America, and a major editorial page makes them sound like they were kidnap victims, picked up at random on their way to the movies.

It's one thing to adopt the euphemisms that suggest we're no longer engaged in a war. These are just words, and in the end it's the policies that matter most. You don't want to call them enemy combatants? Fine. Call them what you want - just don't bring them into the United States. Tired of calling it a war? Use any term you prefer. Just remember it is a serious step to begin unraveling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11.

Lost in the battle of words between past and present administrations is the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court has rendered this debate moot. Within the penumbras and emanations of the Constitution that served as President Obama’s backdrop, the High Court discovered war powers expressly reserved for the courts. Asymmetrical warfare, as bureaucrats at the Pentagon call Islamic terror, doesn’t fit the mold of past military conflicts. Therefore, the deconstructionists on the High Court used the novelty of this strange new global war to usurp powers from the executive branch in the same manner it has from the legislative.

Unfortunately, deconstructionism has yet to find a home in the minds of Islam’s Koranic scholars; while here at home, its corrosive acid threatens our safety, eats away at our liberties and dissolves the words of our already faded Constitution.