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Friday, May 28, 2010

Tickets................................!

This was written by a Mexican who is now a naturalized US Citizen, and I think it's a great explanation of the illegal immigration issue.


Here is the quote:
"If you had tickets to a sports event, concert, Disneyland, or for an airline flight, and when you got to your assigned seat you found someone else was in that seat, what would you do? You would call for a person in charge of ticket checking and have the person in your seat removed. You would properly be asked to show your ticket, and you would gladly and proudly do so, for you have bought and paid for that seat. The person in your seat would also be asked for a ticket, which they would not be able to produce. They would be called “gate crashers” and they would properly be removed.
Now in this huge stadium called the USA we have had millions of gate crashers. We have been asking security to check for tickets and remove the gate crashers. We have been asking security to have better controls in checking at the door. We have asked security to lock the back doors. Security has failed us. They are still looking the other way. They are afraid to ask to see the tickets. Many people say there is unlimited seating, and whether there is or not, no one should be allowed in for free while the rest of us pay full price!
In “section AZ”, of “Stadium USA”, we have had enough of the failures of Security. We have decided to do our own ticket checking, and properly remove those who do not have tickets. Now it seems very strange to me that so many people in the other 49 “sections”, and even many in our own “section” do not want tickets checked, or even to be asked to show their ticket! Even the head of Security is chastising us, while not doing his own job which he has sworn to do.

My own ticket has been bought and paid for, so I am proudly going to show it when asked to do so. I have a right to my seat, and I want the gate crashers to be asked to show their tickets too. The only reason that I can imagine anyone objecting to being asked for their ticket is that they are in favor of gate crashing, and all of the illegal activities that go with it, such as drug smuggling, gang wars, murder, human smuggling for profit, and many more illegal and inhumane acts that we are trying to prevent with our new legislation. Is that what I am hearing from all of the protestors such as Phoenix Mayor Gordon, US Rep. Grijalva, even President Obama? If you are not in favor of showing tickets, (proof of citizenship, passport, green card, or other legal document) when asked, as I would do proudly, then you must be condoning those illegal activities."

Written by a US Citizen, Globe, Arizona.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Mexican President out of line Democrats applaud……..!

Rep. Tom McClintock (a Republican Congressman from CA) gave this speech in response to President Calderon's lecture to Congress, given in the House Chamber in Washington, DC on May 20, 2010.

M. Speaker:

I rise to take strong exception to the speech of the President of Mexico while in this chamber today.

The Mexican government has made it very clear for many years that it holds American sovereignty in contempt and President Calderon's behavior as a guest of the Congress confirms and underscores this attitude. It is highly inappropriate for the President of Mexico to lecture Americans on American immigration policy, just as it would be for Americans to lecture Mexico on its laws.

It is obvious that President Calderon does not understand the nature of America or the purpose of our immigration law.

Unlike Mexico's immigration law -- which is brutally exclusionary – the purpose of America's law is not to keep people out. It is to assure that as people come to the United States, they do so with the intention of becoming Americans and of raising their children as Americans. Unlike Mexico, our nation embraces immigration and what makes that possible is assimilation.

A century ago President Teddy Roosevelt put it this way. He said: "In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American and nothing but an American...There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people."

That is how we have built one great nation from the people of all the nations of the world. The largest group of immigrants now comes from Mexico. A recent RAND study discovered that during most of the 20th Century, while our immigration laws were actually enforced, assimilation worked and made possible the swift attainment of the American dream for millions of immigrants seeking to escape conditions in Mexico.

That is the broader meaning of our nation's motto, "E Pluribus Unum" - from many people, one people, the American people. But there is now an element in our political structure that seeks to undermine that concept of "E Pluribus Unum." It seeks to hyphenate Americans, to develop linguistic divisions, to assign rights and preferences based on race and ethnicity, and to elevate devotion to foreign ideologies and traditions, while at the same time denigrating American culture, American values and American founding principles.

In order to do so, they know that they have to stop the process of assimilation. In order to do that, they must undermine our immigration laws.

It is an outrage that a foreign head of state would appear in this chamber and actively seek to do so. And it is a disgrace that he would be cheered on from the left wing of the White House and by many Democrats in this Congress.

Arizona has not adopted a new immigration law. All it has done is to enforce existing law that President Obama refuses to enforce. It is hardly a radical policy to suggest that if an officer on a routine traffic stop encounters a driver with no driver's license, no passport, and who doesn't speak English, that maybe that individual might be here illegally.

And to those who say we must reform our immigration laws - I reply that we don't need to reform them - we need to enforce them. Just as every other government does. Just as Mexico does!

Above all, this is a debate of, by and for the American people. If President Calderon wishes to participate in that debate, I invite him to obey our immigration laws, apply for citizenship, do what 600,000 LEGAL immigrants to our nation are doing right now, learn our history and our customs, and become an American. And then he will have every right to participate in that debate.

Until then, I would politely invite him to have the courtesy while a guest of this Congress to abide by the fundamental rules of diplomacy between civilized nations not to meddle in each other's domestic debates.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Did you know Ground Zero and downtown Manhattan has a huge Muslim population?

The Ground Zero Mosque - First You Bomb and Then You Occupy
Did you know that downtown Manhattan has a huge Muslim population? That's right, a Muslim population so huge that it can only be serviced by a 100 million dollar mosque to be constructed in a 13 story building.

With that kind of project, you would have to assume that there's a local Muslim community in the tens of thousands that need to be served by a Muslim center. In fact there is no such community. The existing local mosques, including a nondescript metal door stamped Masjid, 5 blocks from Ground Zero, mainly cater to vendors selling burned meat from stores and carts, the "Halal Mafia" who insist on sending waves of foul smelling black smoke everywhere in their vicinity and are known to violently assault other vendors who want to do business in their vicinity.

Then there are the employees of closeout and discount stores selling everything from items bought up from stores that have gone out of business to used clothes and pirated movies in the vicinity of City Hall. These are being gentrified out of business as the neighborhood continues attracting a better class of businesses. Also the majority of those who work there are women. There are a few Muslims working at financial firms on Wall Street, but they are a minority, and they are also not neighborhood residents.

Unlike Park Slope or Boerum Hill or that ugly part of Midwood lined with rundown shops selling phone cards and cheap beads, Lower Manhattan is not home to a large Muslim community. No one seriously claims that it is. Manhattan's storefront mosques are largely used by Pakistani and Afghan Muslims who work nearby but who actually live in Brooklyn, Queens or New Jersey. None of this is seriously in dispute.

Imam Feisal himself admits in an interview that the majority of the worshipers at his mosque in Tribeca are not local members of the community.
The people who come here for jum'a [prayer] come from within the New York tri-state area. Of course, the majority work around here, but a number of them come from Uptown, Brooklyn or New Jersey , specifically to participate in the Friday prayer here and to hear my sermon.

Feisal doesn't even mention any actual Lower Manhattan residents attending his mosque. Only Muslims who work in the area and some who travel just to hear him preach. Which means that contrary to what Feisal told the Community Board, his proposed mosque is not similar to local Jewish and Christian community centers which serve local Jewish and Christian populations. Instead this will be a mosque that may serve something like a 100-200 commuting Muslims at a cost of approximately 1 million dollars per Muslim.

The question then is who is this Ground Zero mosque actually for? If there aren't thousands of Muslim families in need of a 100 million dollar Mosque/Islamic cultural center-- why is it actually being built?

The number of mosques in New York City has increased dramatically in a generation, going from under 10 in 1970 to over a 100 in 2001, including 17 in Manhattan. That number is much higher today and many of the mosques have gone from storefront operations to occupying large buildings and using outreach programs to find converts. Those mosques have also begun to muscle in on local businesses, trying to shut down nearby bars. This establishes the mosque as not just a building where Muslims enter and do what they do, but as a foothold for controlling and remaking entire neighborhoods on a street by street basis.

A number of Manhattan liquor stores have already lost their licenses as the New York Muslim brethren of the Taliban use the municipal bureaucracy to drive them out of business, and if they can't do it legally, then they use threats and intimidation. These are not isolated incidents. Like the Minnesota Muslim cabbies who refused to transport passengers carrying alcohol and instead tried to impose two lines, one for those obedient to Sharia and one for the infidels, or the Target cashiers who refused to scan pork products, this is about imposing Islamic law on Americans.

Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Erdogan once wrote, "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers." Erdogan's vision of Islam is the same as that of the Saudis, which awarded him the "King Faisal International Prize for Service to Islam". And it is Saudi money that is behind the Islamist groups in the US such as CAIR which serve as the public face of Muslims in America.

What does building an Islamic "barracks" near Ground Zero really mean? What does taking over a building that was made defunct by the 9/11 attacks, buying up property for a fraction of their real price in a neighborhood whose commercial property values were destroyed by Islamic terrorism... in order to build one of those "barracks" really say? It's the next phase of the invasion. First you bomb and then you occupy.

After Al Queda "cleared the ground" in the attacks of September 11. This not only killed 3,000 people, but it also poisoned large numbers of rescue workers and damaged a number of nearby buildings, such as the Deutsche Bank building and the old Burlington Coat factory building-- which the proposed Mosque is taking over. And thanks to the massacre and devastation staged by their co-religionists, the 18 million dollar building was instead sold to a Muslim company for under 5 million dollars.

Quite a discount, wouldn't you say? Kill 3,000 infidels and you get to buy the building that your co-religionists devalued at less than a third of the price. Now that is what real Sharia economics looks like.

But occupation forces do this all the time. When the US occupied Germany, it used the IG Farben building, formerly the keystone of the Nazi industrial war machine as its military government headquarters. When the US occupied Baghdad, it took over and used Saddam's palaces as ops centers. First you bomb, then you occupy the headquarters of the enemy. The proposed mosque will be built on property that was hit by Muslim terrorism. Now it will serve as the staging ground for the next phase of the invasion.

As I have demonstrated, this proposed mosque is not meant to serve local Muslims. For one thing there are hardly any. For another thing, Imam Feisal has repeatedly emphasized that the mosque will be an educational and cultural center in order to promote Islam. It will have a swimming pool, a restaurant, a theater, a basketball court and all the trappings of Jewish and Christian community centers-- which makes perfect sense since it is really only aimed at Jews and Christians (and any other assorted infidels that may wander in). Its real model however is that of the Scientology centers which seek to lure in people so that they will join up. And this is just the beginning.
“From a programmatic point of view, this has never been done before,” Feisal added. “If we do this right, we want to franchise this concept, and build other Cordoba Houses like this in other American cities, and cities around the globe.”

Like McDonalds, except for Islam. One billion served. Or is that really one billion serving.

Remember those mosque barracks again? The barracks train the faithful in the way of Islam. And since the days of Mohammed, the way of Islam has been Jihad. And converts to Islam have proven to be extremely reliable terrorists.

The name Cordoba House is a popular one among Muslims operating in the West, because gullible Westerners can be convinced that it's about looking back to a golden age of tolerance between Muslims, Christians and Jews in Spain. In reality however, the use of Cordoba references the Muslim domination of Christians and Jews under the Caliphate of Cordoba which invaded and occupied Spain and parts of France.

The mission of Feisal's Cordoba Initiative; "to achieve a tipping point in Muslim-West relations within the next decade, bringing back the atmosphere of interfaith tolerance and respect that we have longed for since Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together in harmony and prosperity eight hundred years ago"... can be read in one of two ways.

There is the gullible Westerner reading, which is thrilled by the idea of everyone living in peace. And then there is the informed reading which understands that in the Muslim cultural worldview, co-existence and harmony is the product of living under Islamic law. In the Muslim reading of history, there was general tolerance and prosperity under Islam, which can only be restored when the "tipping point" of a global Caliphate is reached and everyone once again is living happily under Islam. Just like in the good old days of Al Andalus and the Cordoba Caliphate.

Is this what Imam Feisal means? Let's consider his explanation of what the Cordoba Initiative is named for.
During its peak in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Cordoba was the most enlightened, pluralistic and tolerant society on earth, one where Muslims and Jews enjoyed a special relationship. My own organisation, the Cordoba Initiative, draws upon this legacy to once again shift Jewish-Muslim relations towards collaboration around our common values and interests

This of course sounds perfectly innocuous to Western ears. Except that one minor detail has been left out. The 10th and 11th centuries were the period of the Cordoba Caliphate. This "special relationship" that Imam Feisal is speaking about consisted of Jews living under Muslim rule and being tolerated by Muslim rulers.

What did this wonderful "special relationship" in Cordoba really look like?
In 1011 in Cordoba, Spain, under Muslim rule, there were pogroms in which, according to various estimates, from hundreds to thousands were murdered.

Meanwhile last month, before wowing gullible Community Board members, Imam Feisal was busy whitewashing Sudan's election where Sudan's El Bashir, who had presided over the genocide of Animists and Christians, was reelected by a sizable majority. The actual election was hopelessly corrupt. How bad was it really? So bad that even the Carter Center panned it. And the Carter Center had previously endorsed Chavez's and Hamas' elections. But that didn't stop Imam Feisal from giving it the green light in numerous articles posted on his Cordoba Initiative site and on Al Jazeera, urging "constructive engagement" with the genocidal Sudanese regime.

Because Cordoba can be anywhere. Anywhere at all that Muslims rule over non-Muslims. So long as Islamic law rules. And what's a little genocide between "believers"? And speaking of Islamic law, another project of the Cordoba Initiative, is the Shariah Index which measures the "Islamicity" of a state that determines how well the country complies with Islamic law. And that is where we are now. The next phase of the invasion. Occupation.

Imam Feisal has already said that terrorism won't end until the West acknowledges the harm it's done to Muslims. This of course is always the starting point at which the cycle of appeasement begins with terrorists. Acknowledge the harm you've done to us. Stop drawing cartoons of Mohammed. Give over some of your civil rights, your women's rights and your rights period. Accept the Medina Charter under which all conflicts are to be resolved by Islamic law. Submit.

The Ground Zero mosque is an obscenity and an abomination. It is no better than raising the Swastika over Auschwitz. Like the Crescent of Embrace, it symbolizes the Islamic dominance even over the graves of its victims. It is a despicable crime against the living and the dead, against the memory of an atrocity, by those who have profited from it.

The Prophet Elijah's rebuke to Ahab, "Have you murdered and also inherited?" would ring in the ears of any civilized person who sees such a terrible thing done. Who watches as the religion of the murderers seeks to erect a monument to its own self-glorification over the incinerated bodies of its victims. Not victims who happened to be killed by people who just happened to be Muslims. But who were murdered in the name of Islam. So that, in the words of the Koran, Islam may be, "victorious over all religions even though the infidels may resist". (Koran 61:9)

So where will the next Times Square bomber come from? Perhaps he will be an ordinary American college student who stops by to look over Ground Zero and is puzzled over the beliefs of those who did this. And so he takes a free tour at the nearby Cordoba House. He is given the heavily whitewashed version of Islam, and he accepts it. He stops by whenever he's in the area and eventually he converts to Islam. As he goes through the stages, he's given more and more of the real beliefs of Islam. And by now he accepts those too. Soon he has no more use for the watered down preaching of Imam Feisal, who has served his purpose by bringing him and so many others through the door. Instead he grows a beard and begins attending a real mosque. Where they talk about the resistance in Palestine and Chechnya and Iraq. Where the Believers are really doing their part to make the world a better place by forcing everyone to live under Islamic law.

Three years later he is standing in front of a Manhattan bar wearing a heavy vest. Underneath it is a bomb. He enters the bar, and cries out, "Allah Akbar." Two years later, the burned remains of the bar finally find a buyer at a fraction of its original price. There is an Imam who wants to open a mosque there.

Monday, May 10, 2010

They Walk Among Us....................in the USA!

They walk among us!

Working in the same TSquare neighborhood where Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen lit his crude VBIED, I can tell you this "Hostile Surveillance" is a daily occurence. So much so that the same vendors who reported this crude attempt or (probe?) are also the ones conducting the surveillance. Security at critical infrastructure, national landmarks and our largest real estate (buildings) has been infiltrated and we have been comprimised!

Complacency and political correctness will kill many.

Luck is not an ally!

We may be headed down a path where history will repeat itself?

Remember Dhirein Barot! The father of Hostile Surveillance in NYC!

If we do not learn from history we are destined to repeat it!

Why?

Stay safe,

Andrew

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Our Legislators and Leadership Needs to Wake UP

Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen has been arrested for parking the bomb-laden SUV in Times Square, which could have killed hundreds if not thousands of people. Kudos to the members of the NYPD and Joint Terrorist Task Force.


Luckily for us, his concoction of explosives failed to detonate and a local street vendor notified a mounted police officer that initiated what appears to be by all accounts a textbook response.


Today, there are more than 100 definitions of terrorism, and they differ even within the United States government. However, at a bare minimum and according to the FBI, terrorism is the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.


From the outset of this event, there were still members of our government at various levels debating or showing reluctance to classify this as a terrorist act, and based on the contents of the vehicle, where it was placed and the damage that could have been done, I find that hard to believe.


After the arrest of Najibullah Zazi last year, the man who planned the attack of the New York City subway system, I wrote a column outlining just some of the loopholes in our immigration laws that could allow our enemies to infiltrate our borders legally. http://thepillarofstrength.com/?p=236. Given that Shahzad was naturalized just last year, and that his wife is living in Pakistan, it is evidently clear that the system is flawed and needs repaired.


Vigilance and intelligence is a must if we are going to be victorious over this enemy, but we need to address the immigration loopholes that presently exist.


The investigative abilities of the United States government at the local, state and federal levels are the best in the world, and our response protocols are getting better everyday as well. It is the leadership and our legislators that must catch up.


We still have leaders that are in denial or attempting to be politically correct when responding to events like this, and there are very few legislators, that truly understand the threats we face and are full steam ahead in creating new laws or amending old ones to keep us safe.


The frequency of the attacks against us are increasing and it is only a matter of time before a good Samaritan, like the Manhattan vendor is no where to be found.


We really really need to wake up.
Posted by Bernard B. Kerik at 10:05 AM
Labels: Faisal Shahzad, Kerik, Najibullah Zazi, NYPD

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Daniel Greenfield article: The Constitution and the Times Square Car Bomber



The Constitution and the Times Square Car Bomber
Posted: 04 May 2010 07:58 PM PDT
Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square Car Bombing suspect, has been caught and will predictably enough be routed through all the formal legalities reserved for Islamic terrorists trying to kill Americans. He will get a criminal trial, a lawyer and a jail sentence after which he, like so many of his compatriots will be released to try and kill again. And quite possibly sooner than anyone might think.


Meanwhile on FOX, Glenn Beck protested the idea of denying a Miranda Warning to Shahzad because he is a US citizen and "you don't shred the constitution." Obviously Beck isn't very familiar with the Constitution, because at no point in time does it mandate a Miranda warning, or compel civil trials for armed insurgents. Instead Beck has confused the Miranda Warning, one of the Warren court's judicial innovations with the Constitution. This is a mistake commonly made by liberals and those who have not educated themselves regarding what the Constitution actually says.

The Warren court pursued its radical agenda of judicial activism by creating an entire spectrum of "rights" based on spurious readings of the Constitution. Warren's technique was simple enough. He would take the actual Constitution and reinterpret the text to suit his political agenda. The actual ruling was not anything that the Framers had ever intended, and had nothing to do with the actual purpose the text was meant to serve. It was just a convenient hook to hang his ruling on.

Take Cruel and Unusual Punishment, which had been meant to ban all sorts of hideous executions and tortures that had been practiced in Europe. The Warren court used it to ban the denaturalization of a army deserter and to rule that imprisoning heroin addicts is illegal, because their addiction is a sickness, not a crime. This had nothing to do with the Eight Amendment of the United States Constitution which was meant to ban certain painful physical punishments, not to control whether junkies could be taken off the street or defectors could be deprived of citizenship. Instead it was used by the court to ban the death penalty for rape, to ban the death penalty for 17 year old murderers, and temporarily the idea of the death penalty itself.

The Miranda Warning that Beck insists is in the Constitution is based on a similarly spurious reading which made the leap to arguing that questioning a suspect without informing him of his rights, such as the aforementioned Ernesto Arturo Miranda, a serial rapist, was the equivalent of denying him those rights. The court's argument in Miranda was that being taken into custody is so intimidating that it is essentially a form of compulsory self-incrimination.

For Beck to argue that a failure to Mirandize "shreds the Constitution" would mean that he seriously believes that the Constitution had been shredded all along until 1966 when Earl Warren fixed it by adding the requirement of a Miranda Warning. This is a belief widely held on the liberal side of the aisle, but I don't think Beck believes that. He is simply following the widely held liberal indoctrination which treats the rulings made through Judicial Activism as equivalent to the actual text of the Constitution.

In his dissent Justice Harlan warned quite accurately that; "I believe the decision of the Court represents poor constitutional law and entails harmful consequences for the country at large. How serious these consequences may prove to be, only time can tell" and pointed out that this was not a ruling meant to prevent abuse, but to protect abusers; "The new rules are not designed to guard against police brutality or other unmistakably banned forms of coercion... Rather, the thrust of the new rules is to negate all pressures, to reinforce the nervous or ignorant suspect, and ultimately to discourage any confession at all."

And Harlan pointed out the risks of treating such a criminal rights agenda as Constitutional. "To incorporate this notion into the Constitution requires a strained reading of history and precedent and a disregard of the very pragmatic concerns that alone may on occasion justify such strains."

All this applies rather glaringly to terrorists, where the question goes well beyond mere criminal conviction. The bottom line is that we are at war. Not with a single serial rapist, but with a fanatical Islamic ideology that like Communism before it, demands world conquest.

Faisal Shahzad was naturalized barely a year ago. Does anyone seriously believe that before this time he did not hold whatever views impelled him to try and set off a car bomb in Times Square? Does being an enemy combatant who took US citizenship under false pretenses entitle him to full immunity?

The Bill of Rights was intended to preserve the rights of Americans, not of enemy combatants masquerading as something they are not. An Islamic terrorist has by definition taken a false oath, as he certainly does not bear "true faith and allegiance" to the United States. He had no intention of defending it against its enemies. He is one of its enemies.

During WW2, Nazi Germany sent a number of saboteurs into the United States, one of whom was a US Citizen. They were not given Miranda Warnings, obviously. They were not treated with kid gloves. They were tried by a military tribunal and executed less than two months after they arrived in the United States. Read that again. Less than 2 months. If you want to understand why we won WW2 and are losing the war now, consider the implications of what you just read.


The old United States could take an enemy combatant, arrest him, try him, run the decision through the Supreme Court, and still execute him in under two months. We're lucky if we can bring a captured terrorist to trial after 7 years. At which point we release him on time served and send him back to fight us again. If we had Osama bin Laden sitting in the dock right now, if he confessed to every crime and begged for the death penalty, it would probably still take us at least a decade to execute him, assuming we could even find a jury that would vote for the death penalty for him.

And Miranda is one of the reasons why. Not so much Miranda itself, as the agenda behind it. The agenda that gives the murderer every form of defense and discretion, and provides none to his victims. The agenda that rewards evil, but punishes good.

The fact of the matter is that it was common practice to treat spies, saboteurs and pirates as unlawful combatants who were tried by military tribunals and executed at will, regardless of whether their disguise included US citizenship or not.

In the case of the WW2 saboteurs, Ex parte Quirin, the court stated that;


...entry upon our territory [317 U.S. 1, 37] in time of war by enemy belligerents, including those acting under the direction of the armed forces of the enemy, for the purpose of destroying property used or useful in prosecuting the war, is a hostile and war-like act. It subjects those who participate in it without uniform to the punishment prescribed by the law of war for unlawful belligerents. It is without significance that petitioners were not alleged to have borne conventional weapons or that their proposed hostile acts did not necessarily contemplate collision with the Armed Forces of the United States.

Paragraphs 351 and 352 of the Rules of Land Warfare, already referred to, plainly contemplate that the hostile acts and purposes for which unlawful belligerents may be punished are not limited to assaults on the Armed Forces of the United States. Modern warfare is directed at the destruction of enemy war supplies and the implements of their production and transportation quite as much as at the armed forces. Every consideration which makes the unlawful belligerent punishable is equally applicable whether his objective is the one or the other. The law of war cannot rightly treat those agents of enemy armies who enter our territory, armed with explosives intended for the destruction of war industries and supplies, as any the less belligerent enemies than are agent similarly entering for the purpose of destroying fortified places or our Armed Forces. By passing our boundaries for such purposes without uniform or other emblem signifying their belligerent status, or by discarding that means of identification after entry, such enemies become unlawful belligerents subject to trial and punishment.

Citizenship in the United States of an enemy belligerent does not relieve him from the consequences of a belligerency which is unlawful because in violation of the law of war.

The only remaining objection to treating Faisal Shahzad as an enemy combatant is that there is no "declared war" and thus there can be no enemy combatants. This is a basic fallacy that relies on the fact that we are not fighting individual nations, but rather an ideology. We have come as close as possible to declaring war, within that limitation. Islam is not an enemy state, just as Communism is not an enemy state. It is a war waged by followers of a global ideology who number in the hundreds of millions. The language of conventional wars fought by one nation against another cannot encompass this.

But those who would condemn the War on Terror as illegitimate because it is not against a named state, had better be prepared to argue that the Tripolitan War fought against Muslim pirates without a formal Declaration of War under Thomas Jefferson, their destruction supported by George Washington, was equally "Unconstitutional".

Jefferson's push for an international alliance and his eventual determination to go it alone, arguably made him the first Neoconservative. The likes of Ron Paul might castigate the Founders as "Unconstitutional" because they fought the Tripolitan War without a declaration of war, assaulted the sovereignty of the Pasha of Tripoli, and didn't read anyone their Miranda Rights, but I don't think anyone else in their right mind would. And the War on Terror has been more formally declared than the Tripolitan War.


Indeed what warmonger neoconservative was it that said; "Would to Heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind or crush them into non-existence". Was it Dick Cheney? No, I'm afraid it was George Washington, who would no doubt be pilloried today for his genocidal rhetoric in the editorial pages of the modern New York Times and the op eds of Pat Buchanan on AntiWar.com. But Washington was a man of peace as well as a man of war, and he understood that there are times when "war is not of our choice." This is one of those times.

There's something fundamentally wrong when people who should be conservatives instead start talking like ACLU lawyers. Start believing that Miranda is a Constitutional right, rather than a bit of judicial activism legerdemain. Start thinking that we should be fighting the War on Terror by following the model of the American Bar Association, rather than that of Washington, Jefferson, FDR and every wartime President between them.

The Constitution was never intended to serve as a suicide pact. It was never intended to protect enemies of the United States under the colors of the flag. Its Bill of Rights protected the rights of Americans, not the rights of its enemies. Our laws exist in order to safeguard the rights of Americans. When they are exploited to aid those who deprive Americans of their lives and liberties, then they have been undeniably perverted to play a role opposite to that of their original purpose. The work of the Warren Court is a comprehensive illustration of laws turned in on themselves. No country can have or maintain laws inimical to its survival for very long. And a country that protects its enemies will eventually fall by their sword.



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