Treason 84

Adam Gedahn, the American traitor, has been arrested in Pakistan.

The American-born spokesman for al-Qaida has been arrested by Pakistani intelligence officers in the southern city of Karachi, two officers and a government official said Sunday, the same day Adam Gadahn appeared in a video … praising the U.S. Army major charged with killing 13 people in Fort Hood, Texas, as a role model for other Muslims.

Gadahn has appeared in more than half a dozen al-Qaida videos, taunting and threatening the West and calling for its destruction.

A U.S. court charged Gadahn with treason in 2006, making him the first American to face such a charge in more than 50 years.

The treason charge carries the death penalty if he is convicted. He was also charged with two counts of providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.

And here are extracts from an impressive article by Andrew McCarthy in which he discusses the moral issues raised by lawyers who volunteer their free services to defend enemy prisoners and expect us to consider them noble for doing so.

A number of them (reportedly nine) worked for the law firm Covington and Burling, in which Eric Holder, now Attorney General, was a partner, and are now on the payroll of his Justice Department.

The legal profession’s depiction of these lawyers as heroic servants not of the enemy but of the Constitution is unmitigated nonsense: You can’t be performing a vital constitutional function when the function is not required by the Constitution. They can repeat the lie a million times, but that won’t make it a fact.These lawyers made a conscious decision to contribute their services, usually gratis, to enemy combatants with whom the American people are at war. …

There is something wrong with a legal profession that insists we not only let American lawyers take up the enemy’s cause but that we admire them for doing so.

Most Americans — at least those who are not graduates of American law schools — would say that, when we go to war, our compelling national interest is victory. If something is legally required of us (e.g., compliance with the Geneva Conventions when the enemy is entitled to its protections), we agree that we must comply. But our agreement is appropriately grudging. We’re at war with savages. They should not get one iota beyond what is minimally required. And if you, non-lawyer, decided to help the enemy, give advice to the enemy, contribute money to the enemy, or conduct trade with the enemy, you would find yourself indicted. You would become the object of your countrymen’s scorn. …

As the law is currently understood, it is legal for a lawyer to volunteer his services to America’s enemies. It is absurd, however, to suggest that we have to applaud that decision. And it is equally ludicrous to suggest that we are forbidden from drawing the obvious conclusion that a lawyer who makes such a decision is predisposed to condemn the United States and to sympathize with America’s enemies

Here’s the landscape: The Obama Justice Department is staffed with many lawyers who volunteered their services to America’s enemies. Since those lawyers have been running the department, there has been a detectable shift in favor of due-process rights for terrorists, a bias in favor of civilian trials in which terrorists are vested with all the rights of American citizens, a bias against military tribunals, the extension of Miranda protections to enemy combatants, a concerted effort to publish previously classified information detailing interrogation methods and depicting the alleged abuse of detainees, efforts to subject lawyers who authorized aggressive counterterrorism policies to professional sanction, the reopening of investigations against CIA interrogators even though those cases were previously closed by apolitical law-enforcement professionals, and the continued accusation that officials responsible for designing and carrying out the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies committed war crimes.