Thursday, March 11, 2010

the "al qaeda seven"

In case you haven't been following this story, an organization called "Keep America Safe," headed by such worthy statesmen as Liz Cheney and William Kristol, recently released this gem of an ad insinuating that former attorneys of terror suspects share the values of terrorists. Even for most defenders of the criminal Bush regime the ad goes too far, but then again that might just be because multiple high-ranking members of the Bush administration, including Michael Mukasey and Michael Chertoff, former Attorney General and Secretary of Homeland Security respectively, fall into the same category as the alleged "al qaeda seven."

But then again, there's plenty of conservatives who defend the ad, thus opening themselves up to ridicule! And so, ridicule I shall. Partly for fun. And partly because the defense of such an absurd attack exposes the absurdity of "conservatism's" positions on terrorism in general. For instance, this article from National Review draws a parallel between Islamism's and the Left's "need to condemn American policies and radically alter the United States." I quote below:

"[I] supported such counterterrorism policies as indefinite detention for enemy combatants, military-commission trials, aggressive interrogation of top jihadists, warrantless surveillance of enemy communications, and who hold the general view that jihadist terror is driven by Islamist ideology."

And then, wait for it....

"But before they can impose their utopias, Islamists and the Left have a common enemy they need to take down: the American constitutional tradition of a society based on individual liberty, in which government is our servant, not our master... If lawyers choose to volunteer their services to the enemy in wartime, they are on the wrong side of that fault line, and no one should feel reluctant to say so."

So, the person who wants the President to have the power to indefinitely detain people without charge or representation is the defender of the constitutional tradition based on individual liberty, and the people who represent terrorists (or rather, accused terrorists)
against an unrestrained executive power are trying to impose a society in which government is our master? Could that be any more incoherent of an argument???

[For the record, the names of the "al qaeda seven" were recently made public by the DOJ.]



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