… the US Navy must give up its training exercises. 

This story would be hard to believe if we were not already aware of the degree of idiocy some judges are capable of. 

 This from Power Line:

Speaking at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania last Saturday, Obama addressed the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision granting Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their confinement through habeas corpus proceedings in federal court. Obama asserted that the "principle of habeas corpus, that a state can’t just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process – that’s the essence of who we are." He explained:

I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday.

John and I derived some precepts for trial lawyers from the Nuremberg trial in "Lessons from the cross-examination of Hermann Goehring." In the course of researching that article I was reminded that the Nuremberg trial was conducted before a military commission composed of representatives of the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. The most prominent surviving Nazi leaders were brought for trial before the Nuremberg tribunal in late 1945. Winston Churchill had proposed, not unreasonably, that they be summarily shot. The victorious allies nevertheless subsequently agreed that they would be brought before a military commission to be convened pursuant to the London Agreement of August 8, 1945.

 

In Boumediene, the Supreme Court disapproved of the system of military commissions Congress had adopted at the Supreme Court’s urging. Obama to the contrary notwithstanding, the Nuremberg defendants’ "day in court" occurred before the kind of tribunal the Supreme Court found constitutionally inadequate in Boumediene.

The Nazi war criminals were given no access to American courts. Their rights were governed by the charter annexed to the London Agreement. Here is the fair trial provision of the charter:

In order to ensure fair trial for the Defendants, the following procedure shall be followed:

 

(a) The Indictment shall include full particulars specifying in detail the charges against the Defendants. A copy of the Indictment and of all the documents lodged with the Indictment, translated into a language which he understands, shall be furnished to the Defendant at reasonable time before the Trial.

(b) During any preliminary examination or trial of a Defendant he will have the right to give any explanation relevant to the charges made against him.

(c) A preliminary examination of a Defendant and his Trial shall be conducted in, or translated into, a language which the Defendant understands.

(d) A Defendant shall have the right to conduct his own defense before the Tribunal or to have the assistance of Counsel.

(e) A Defendant shall have the right through himself or through his Counsel to present evidence at the Trial in support of his defense, and to cross-examine any witness called by the Prosecution.

The charter provision on the appeal rights of the Nuremberg defendants was even shorter and sweeter. There were no appeal rights. Article 26 provided: "The judgment of the Tribunal as to the guilt or the innocence of any Defendant shall give the reasons on which it is based, and shall be final and not subject to review."

 

In short, the procedural protections afforded the Guantanamo detainees under the statute before the Supreme Court in Boumediene substantially exceed those accorded the Nuremberg defendants. Obama’s unfavorable comparison of the legal treatment of the Guantanamo detainees with that of the Nuremberg defendants suggest either that he does not know what he’s talking about, or that he feels free to take great liberties with the truth.

 Read here what the Koran and the hadith prescribe for the position and treatment of women and little girls.  

Women are slaves in Islam. They can be, and are, brutally treated and have no remedies.   

 Read to the end of this report on the freeing from prison of Abu Qatada, ‘Bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe’, by a British court, to discover how much it is costing the British  tax-payer to keep and protect this dangerous man.

Scroll down to about one third the length of the page to find the article. 

 The wisdom of an atheist we much admire, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, shines in all she says.

For example:

Hirsi Ali has used her platform to challenge Westerners about their own inconsistencies. Having come late to the political culture of individual rights and the rule of law, she was astonished by the willingness of many in the West to cast a blind eye to gross violations of rights so long as they occurred among foreigners. The multiculturalism that guided Dutch policy in the 1990s sprang from a desire to respect difference, but in practice it meant tolerance for what, if undertaken by native Dutchmen, would be crimes.

"People in the West swallow this sort of thing because they have learned not to examine the religions or cultures of minorities too critically, for fear of being called racist," she wrote. "It fascinates them that I am not afraid to do so."

"Human beings are equal, cultures are not," she told a New York audience last year:

A culture that celebrates femininity is not equal to a culture that trims the genitals of her girls. A culture that holds the door open to her women is not equal to one that confines them behind walls and veils. … A culture that encourages dating between young men and young women is not equal to a culture that flogs or stones a girl for falling in love. A culture where monogamy is an aspiration is not equal to a culture where a man can lawfully have four wives all at once.

Read the whole article from Front Page Magazine here. 

 

 This great event has just been reported by Little Green Footballs.

In an experiment that has been underway for 20 years at Michigan State University, biologist Richard Lenski has actually observed evolution at work in E. Coli bacteria.

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers’ eyes. It’s the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations. The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

Mostly, the patterns Lenski saw were similar in each separate population. All 12 evolved larger cells, for example, as well as faster growth rates on the glucose they were fed, and lower peak population densities.

But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species. The citrate-using mutants increased in population size and diversity.

“It’s the most profound change we have seen during the experiment. This was clearly something quite different for them, and it’s outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species, which makes it especially interesting,” says Lenski.

 Read about them here. 

 The President appoints the people he works with, who may be very bad for the country, but the President himself is not to be held responsible for any harm they do?

So thinks Bill Steigerwald, interviewed in Townhall:

Q: If he [Barack Obama] became president, would you lose any sleep at night?

A: I wouldn’t over him. I would worry about the people he would surround himself with. I have a very high opinion of him in most respects. I don’t think he’d do anything consciously to put the country in peril. But I would worry about who his secretary of state was, I’d worry about who his secretary of interior was, I’d worry that he’d be hostile to private enterprise and the appointments he’d make. But he himself doesn’t really bother me at all. 

An outstanding example of stupidity! 

 Ireland voted no to giving the unelected bureaucrats who govern Europe still more power. The bureaucrats are furious and unlikely to take no for an answer.

Read here how ‘anti-Americanism and naive pacifism’  are turning Europe into ‘one big soup, ready to be consumed by immigrating Islamic hordes’.   

 Can it be true that tiny children, some only two years old,  are treated like this by Arabs?