I can’t add your post to Digg. How I do this?…

Amusingly enough, in doing a bit of searching I discovered that the old Weather Underground folks also wanted to attack Fort Dix. And according to Wikipedia, then as now, proper prosecution was hindered because the government tried to get cute with their COINTELPRO program instead of following the law.

You wrote:

“These safeguards would best be served by making the government prove any accused US citizens to have been members of organizations such as al Qaeda, or prove their extreme dangerousness as terrorists plotting largescale attacks, under rules of evidence that are even stricter than those afforded aliens such as al-Marri, before being turned over to any military tribunal or detained indefinitely.”

I think you need a constitutional lawyer to comment on that proposal, because it may not pass constitutional muster. My own feeling, and I assume that neither of us are lawyers, is that once you set up those safeguards, there are criminal charges that could hold up under our current laws in Regular Courts.

If someone is accused of being a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer in the post 9/11 America, they are sometimes held indefinitely, until the constitutionally undeclared ‘War against terror’ is over, which by most estimates will not be for many more years.

While such suspects are held, we do not know what they are subjected to nor how they are supposed to prove their innocence.

In Buffalo, we have someone called “The Bike Path Rapist” who was serving a life-sentence for murder and rape. Three separate woman identified him in three separate assaults in different places at different times. He was diagnosed as schizophrenic and was untreated for his mental illness. He was not granted parole because he showed no remorse; he insisted he was innocent. Well, he was. Another man committed the crimes and was caught after he struck again.

I think the great beauty of our country is that cases like this are not supposed to happen. We have to defend ourselves against attacks for two reasons: first, to protect ourselves, and second to protect our way of life and justice from the wave of chaos that would follow a successful attack of the unthinkable kind.

So you and whoever chooses to think about this are correct, this is not an easy question.

The man who served over twenty years for a crime he didn’t commit is back home with his family. He is in his fifties now. The state has issued an apology.

This string of commentary has not brought any light on what YOU worked so assiduously to construct: an argument for legally handling suspected terrorists who are legal aliens or who are actual citizens NOT captured on the battlefield.

Your great and wise commentator Trimegestus, as usual, ignored EVERY point and nuance of your argument and wrote his all too usual and all too boring self-inflated balderdash. If I did not know how unfunny people are in Blogosphere-istan, I would think Trimegestus was a leftie like me trying to bring down your arguments by stupid comments.

I understand you cannot ban fans of your site, but couldn’t you ask them to stay on point?

First off the bat, I want to thank you specifically for giving a more detailed and better explained answer than can be contained in a sentence of two.

As far as a lot of the antecedents in your response go, I disagree with the premise, implications, and assumptions of a lot of them – but I think it’s pretty clear that we’re not going to cover those with any degree of adequacy in a comments section. So, would it be reasonable at this point for us to agree to disagree on those topics, with the intent of reaching some sort of reasonable middle ground on the questions at hand?

If so, I’d like to ask your forbearance on the comment you made specific to this post, so I can think through it a bit more and give you something better thought out than a reflexive, off-the-cuff response.

Best regards,

BRD

The Left is not going to be happy until terrorists can be tried as ordinary criminals, in ordinary criminal courts—with all the attendant circus atmosphere, lawyerly misdirection, waffling judges, intrusive media and leaking of important data (which might have been used to prevent future terrorist acts).

If nothing else, from a purely practical point of view, trying to keep a civilian jury safe from threats and intimidation under such circumstances would be impossible (not to metnion the fact that courthouses and jails would immediately become terrorist targets). Also, the fact that, due to the current state of society, the courts, both civil and criminal, are seriously backed up, and move very slowly.

So, I agree with you. Either the Left really does want terrorists to gain a safe haven in the US, in which case all their actions and arguments are made in order to achieve that end, or they really are too dumb to realize how catastrophic this could be, and why it’s unwise to treat terrorists like ordinary crooks.

Either way, they should not be listened to. (I mean, for G-d’s sake, they’ve been telling us all the years what a peach Castro is!)