Here, from the Wall Street Journal, is an article endorsing the idea quoted in the post below (Have they won?), that the states should curb the powers of the federal government; but setting out a more reasoned argument for how it might be done, by constitutional amendment.

For nearly a hundred years, federal power has expanded at the expense of the states—to a point where the even the wages and hours of state employees are subject to federal control. Basic health and safety regulations that were long exercised by states under their “police power” are now dominated by Washington.

The courts have similarly distorted the Constitution by inventing new constitutional rights and failing to limit governmental power as provided for in the document. The aggrandizement of judicial power has been a particularly vexing challenge, since it is inherently incapable of correction through the normal political channels.

There is a way to deter further constitutional mischief from Congress and the federal courts, and restore some semblance of the proper federal-state balance. That is to give to states—and through them the people—a greater role in the constitutional amendment process. 

The idea is simple, and is already being mooted in conservative legal circles. Today, only Congress can propose constitutional amendments—and Congress of course has little interest in proposing limits on its own power. Since the mid-19th century, no amendment has actually limited federal authority.

But what if a number of states, acting together, also could propose amendments? That has the potential to reinvigorate the states as a check on federal power. It could also return states to a more central policy-making role. …

The answer is to amend the Constitution to permit two-thirds of the states to propose amendments directly. To do so, of course, means that the states would have to first call for a constitutional convention—at which they could propose such a change.

What about the risk of a runaway convention? We think that risk is very small. In the first place, the Constitution is not the Articles of Confederation, which were ratified only six years before they were replaced.

By contrast, the American people are profoundly attached to the Constitution. It cannot and will not be replaced by an amending convention. In any event, nothing proposed at such a convention—including a change to the current amendment process—could be adopted without three-fourths of the state legislatures agreeing. …

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution never thought the balance of powers between states and the federal government would ever get so profoundly distorted. James Madison dismissed claims that the new federal government could displace the states as “chimerical fears,” assuring his readers in The Federalist Papers that “[t]he powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite.” Indeed, the Framers considered a “vertical” separation of powers—between federal and state authority—just as important as guaranteeing the success of liberty as the “horizontal” separation of powers between the president, Congress and the courts.

True enough, re-establishing a proper balance—where, as Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, Washington is responsible “principally [for] external objects” and the states for “all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people”—will not be easy.

The gain will be substantial. Although it seems that permitting the states to propose amendments is a small thing, especially because ratification would still require three-fourths of the states to agree, it would shift the power calculus—and create a potential for action that the president, Congress and courts could never ignore as they consider the proper boundaries of their own authority.

Moreover, the effort to enable the states to check Washington’s power would provide a constructive outlet for much of the growing anger—specially evident in phenomena such as the “tea party” movement—toward the political elites of both parties. It is not a partisan proposal and is difficult to oppose. The purpose is to move significant authority closer to the electorate, but in a measured, “conservative” manner that is in no sense “populist.”

Opponents would have no fig leaf. They would have to openly argue that any effort to limit Washington’s reach is a bad thing. And that is an argument they are likely to lose.

Read it all here.

With the federal government taking control of one sixth of the economy by means of ‘health care reform’, America is on the road to socialism and consequent decline, and it’s hard to see how the damage can be undone. Once entitlements are granted in law it becomes well nigh impossible to take them away again, as Europe has learnt the hard way.

Has America gone over the ‘precipice’, to use Obama’s word for this change? (We suspect he didn’t know what the word means, but it’s more apt than he could have intended.)

What sort of world is emerging with the connivance, or the capitulation, of the new weaker socialist America, which will no longer protect Western civilization?

Will America no longer be ‘the last best hope on earth’?

Is global government, the tyranny from which there can be no escape, inevitable?

Is there anything dissenting Americans – apparently a majority if the polls are right – can do to recover their liberty? Or is it too late to do anything?

Is there any point in looking to the Republican Party? Seems not, with its present leaders.

What if it had stronger leadership?

Here’s a suggestion by JB Williams at Canada Free Press:

This morning on Fox Sunday with Chris Wallace, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) conceded that Republican senators won’t be able to stop Democratic health care reform legislation from passing the Senate before Christmas.

“We will fight until the last vote,” McCain told Chris Wallace. “We owe that to our constituents, because we must do everything—we must look back and say we did everything to prevent this terrible mistake from taking place.”

I beg to differ with Senator John McCain… (which is nothing new) …

Another useless NAY vote is NOT everything they can do! …

McCain is right about one thing… Congressional Republicans have NO “legislative” POWER to stop the current assault on all things American taking place in Washington DC today. That’s because there is NO legitimate legislative process taking place in Washington DC today.

In the good old days, when the three administrative branches of the federal government kept independent checks upon each other, politicians were able to hide behind their NAY vote as a demonstration of opposition to anti-American and unconstitutional policies.

Those days are gone!

There is NO legitimate legislative process taking place in Washington DC today and even those who support this anti-American nonsense know it. More than 60% of American citizens strongly oppose every policy coming out of DC today – President Obama’s personal approval rating is in the toilet and still sinking, as is the approval rating of the leftist controlled congress.

Still, the left accelerates its rush into unbridled Global Marxism as if totally unconcerned with the “will of the people”, their limited constitutional authority, or the objections of Republicans in congress.

Republicans have only ONE chance left!

To save themselves from being painted with the same Marxist brush appropriate for today’s Democrats, stop the current slaughter of Americans sovereignty, security and prosperity, and unite the 60% of Americans in desperate need of leadership, congressional Republicans have ONE play remaining.

WALK OUT and STAY OUT!

Walk out of congress TODAY!

Force leftist Democrats to destroy this nation all alone!

Publicly name every vote bought off with state pork in the last ten months!

Call it what it is, a complete sham and rape of this nation!

Refuse to provide any form of cover for this sham and return home!

Once home, meet with state legislators to erect Tenth Amendment walls of defense at the state lines!

Once state defenses are erected, begin meeting with Tea Party and Town Hall patriots to begin the process of reclaiming the free republic.

Your Alternative?

Go down in flames with all other anti-American leftists in DC, currently running roughshod over the vast majority of American citizens opposed to everything going on in that sinking cesspool of political corruption called the federal government. …

Obama’s policies are set to tip these states and maybe others, over the brink in early 2010!

Trust me when I tell you, Congressional Republicans have NO other viable options.

But we have entered a new era in America… The enemies of freedom and liberty are in full control of all three branches of the federal government. There is NO legitimate constitutional process in Washington DC today. Republicans have NO “in chamber” power to stop the dismantling of America and only three defenses of the free republic remain.

Republicans MUST separate themselves from the sham immediately or go down in flames with the Democratic Socialists of America in charge!

The state legislatures MUST erect Tenth Amendment walls of defense at the state lines.

The people MUST unite in patriotic resistance, with or without Republicans!

The Republicans in Congress are very unlikely to take such bold action. So what remains? Many recognize that this is a critical moment for America and the world. Even among the well-behaved, mild-mannered Tea Party protestors there are some who talk of secession, and some even of revolution.

Many Americans are arming themselves. Is the revolution, if it comes, likely to be a violent one?

From IMED:

David Miliband has stated that the procurement of an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni will not happen again.

This follows anger from pro-democracy, pro-Israeli groups and the Israeli government itself at this outrageous use of unjustified and perverted ‘legal weapon’.

This is not the first time that anti-Israeli campaigners have attempted to use such a tool:

•                October 2009: Former military chief Moshe Yaalon was forced to cancel a visit to the UK after being warned that he might face arrest.

•                October 2009: An attempt to obtain an arrest warrant for the Defence Minister Ehud Barak failed after the court ruled that he had diplomatic immunity

•                September 2005: An arrest warrant was issued for former IDF head General Doron Almog. He received warning before leaving an aircraft at Heathrow Airport, and was forced to fly straight back to Israel.

While we at IMED of course believe that there is no justification for such a warrant, and that to accuse Israeli leaders of war crimes is tainted with great hypocrisy and irrational hatred; we are more alarmed at the mob’s increasing acquisition of legal powers.

The state of Israel demonstrated great foresight when she declared that she would not be part of the International Criminal Court. Anti-Israeli groups and Governments immediately decried this decision as that of a guilty party. And so what an impeccable decision Israel made in view of recent events.

What fragments of sovereign statehood remains when an international court – answerable to no-one – has jurisdiction over all countries and peoples? And as Israel foresaw, abuse of such power is rife; what could be more important to the State of Israel than that of sovereignty? – it is the fundamental tenet on which she subsists; the guarantee that a Jew can be protected is promised by Israel’s existence. This unchallenged power, that of these deified international law courts, that allows the arrest and trials of persons anywhere, clashes with the very principles of liberty and democracy.

It is eerily reminiscent of the fall of the Roman Republic – a once proud democracy brought to its knees by the sham trials of its leaders – legal executions by the mob, egged on by cruel, ambitious dictators-to-be.

In what sane world can an individual be tried for a crime based on evidence provided by terrorist groups and circulated by the unwitting media? This is what has happened – Hamas weeps crocodile tears for one lost Palestinian child, while forcing another child at gunpoint to carry their weapons.

As Sam Westrop wrote in an earlier IMED post:

Mashaal may visit Britain without worry – despite his personal involvement with countless murders, including the barbaric slaughter of Holocaust survivors – while Barak faces the prospect of arrest.

Here is an excellent article on the subject in the Jerusalem Post:

The latest episode in which, to paraphrase Karl von Clausewitz, law is used as the continuation of war by other means…

Israel’s enemies still come away with a propaganda victory because reports that a high-ranking Israeli was accused of such heinous charges chip away at Israel’s legitimacy. Note that al-Jazeera on Monday headlined the Livni warrant story instead of immediately going live to Gaza for Hamas’s anniversary rally…

The British legal system adheres to “universal jurisdiction” in the matter of war crimes. A magistrates’ court need only be convinced to issue a warrant – based on claims by advocacy groups supporting the Palestinian Arab cause – for an Israeli official to be taken into custody for events that had nothing to do with Britain…

Some suggest Brown and Miliband have purposefully not fulfilled this promise to chastise Israel. Others say they simply lack the political capital to face down their own rabidly pro-Palestinian backbenchers and – just months before national elections – do not want to be dependent on the Tories to pass a law.

Whatever the explanation, this has not been Britain’s finest hour.

We also recommend this article by Joshua Rozenberg in Standpoint magazine:

There is an important safeguard against inappropriate use of the Geneva Conventions Act. English law says that criminal proceedings in respect of alleged offences occurring after August 2001 cannot be instituted without the Attorney General’s consent.

But that safeguard does not extend to arrest. Anyone may obtain a warrant from a magistrate without notice by producing information, substantiated on oath, that a named person is suspected of a serious offence. Broadly speaking, the police must then arrest the person concerned.

Brown and Miliband have both frantically contacted Livni and the Israeli Government, reassuring them that Israeli politicians and representatives are welcome in the UK, but unless the law is changed, Britain will let the law be perverted in the name of a supreme international authority that so cynically claims to uphold the law, while it discharges only injustice.

Here is part of a letter from the National Association of Gun Rights. We suggest that if our readers care about this issue – as we do –  they contact the Association and sign its petition against this treaty.

Dear fellow patriot,

With willing one-world accomplices in Washington, D.C., gun-grabbers around the globe believe they have it made.

In fact, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just announced the Obama Administration would be working hand in glove with the UN to pass a new “Small Arms Treaty.”

Disguised as legislation to help in the fight against “terrorism,” “insurgency” and “international crime syndicates,” the UN Small Arms Treaty is nothing more than a massive, GLOBAL gun control scheme.

Ultimately, the UN’s Small Arms Treaty is designed to register, ban and CONFISCATE firearms owned by private citizens like YOU. …

So far, the gun-grabbers have successfully kept the exact wording of their new scheme under wraps.

But looking at previous versions of the UN “Small Arms Treaty,” you and I can get a good idea of what’s likely in the works.

If passed by the UN and ratified by the U.S. Senate, the UN “Small Arms Treaty” would almost certainly FORCE national governments to:

*** Enact tougher licensing requirements, making law-abiding citizens cut through even more bureaucratic red tape just to own a firearm legally;

*** CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL “unauthorized” civilian firearms (all firearms owned by the government are excluded, of course);

*** BAN the trade, sale and private ownership of ALL semi-automatic weapons;

*** Create an INTERNATIONAL gun registry, setting the stage for full-scale gun CONFISCATION. …

Ever since it’s founding almost 65 years ago, the United Nations has been hell-bent on bringing the United States to its knees.

To the petty dictators and one-worlders who control the UN, the U.S. isn’t a “shining city on a hill” — it’s an affront to their grand totalitarian designs for the globe.

These anti-gun globalists know that so long as Americans remain free to make our own decisions without being bossed around by big government bureaucrats, they’ll NEVER be able to seize the worldwide oppressive power they crave.

And the UN’s apologists also know the most effective way to finally strip you and me of ALL our freedoms would be to DESTROY our gun rights.

Among free people there will always be many who hold absurd beliefs, such as those of Christianity. Some will hold beliefs that are not only absurd but cruel, such as those of Islam. The beliefs should be argued against. The people who hold them should not be persecuted, though they must be stopped from harming others. That remains in any case the most important function of law.

From an article by Luke Goodrich, Director of The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, in the Wall Street Journal:

The view of religion as a threat is, of course, common. “New atheists,” such as Richard Dawkins, are one manifestation of that view; he dubs the Catholic Church a “disgusting institution,” one of the “greatest force[s] for evil in the world.” But new atheists are not the only ones. Others cite a history of religious wars, Muslim oppression of women, or Christian skepticism of science as proving the dangers of religion. Backward, superstitious, and bigoted, a threat to science and progress: religion is a divisive, intolerant force that governments should tame.

There are two possible responses to this view. One is to attack the premise, arguing that, no, religion really is a force for social good. Religion motivated 19th century abolitionists; religion gave us Mother Teresa; religion permeates the Louvre.

But might there be reasons to protect religious freedom even assuming religion is harmful? I offer three.

First, a practical one: suppressing religion may exacerbate the very problems it is designed to solve. History shows that religion does not disappear when governments try to suppress it. It goes underground, sometimes erupting more violently than if it were not suppressed.

Second, empowering governments to deem religion harmful, and therefore suppress it, opens the door to tyranny. Freedom of religion and freedom of expression are inextricably linked. If the government can deem religion harmful and suppress it in the name of public order, it can do the same to other ideas. It is no coincidence that many of the 20th century’s most tyrannical governments—Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia—made suppression of religion a centerpiece of their administration.

[Third] Finally, suppressing religion—even when done in the name of freedom and equality—strikes at the heart of human dignity, which is the foundation of all human rights. Every human being is born with a “religious” impulse—the urge to seek truth, to embrace the truth as one finds it, and to order one’s life accordingly. As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, “All human beings are born free” and are “endowed with reason and conscience.” Absent a serious threat of violence or imminent harm, suppressing religion interferes with people’s ability to be fully human, to seek and embrace the truth as they understand it. A serious commitment to human rights requires governments to respect the religious impulse—even if much of society thinks religious beliefs are wrong, silly, or even harmful. If the European Court of Human Rights cannot get past its fear of religion, its jurisprudence will only become more incoherent, and all human rights more fragile.

On the second and third points we agree. They are in defense of freedom.

To the first point – that persecution can strengthen an undesirable movement – we would add this maxim from our own Articles of Reason:

Many a belief can survive persecution but not critical examination.

Obama is prepared to damage the economy even more than he has already. He threatens through his officials that if he doesn’t get his way with cap-and-trade, he will take steps that will ‘deter investment’. But then if he does get his way with cap-and-trade, the economy will be grossly harmed anyway. Whose economy is it that he’s threatening? Is it not the economy of the country he leads? So why would he want to wreck it?  The answer is not hard to find. Look to Copenhagen, where the rampaging Left is using false science to try and impose ‘world governance’.  This was to be the moment when international socialism triumphed. It’s been spoilt by exposure of the scientists’ deceptions. The global warmists/global government conspirers are fighting mad. They’ll wreck anything, everything, to achieve their hellish aim.

From Fox News:

The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn’t move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a “command-and-control” role over the process in a way that could hurt business.

The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity, came on the eve of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s address to the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Jackson, however, tried to strike a tone of cooperation in her address Wednesday, explaining that the EPA’s new powers to regulate greenhouse gases will be used to complement legislation pending in Congress, not replace it.”This is not an ‘either-or’ moment. It’s a ‘both-and’ moment,” she said. But while administration officials have long said they prefer Congress take action on climate change, the economic official who spoke with reporters Tuesday night made clear that the EPA will not wait and is prepared to act on its own.

And it won’t be pretty.

“If you don’t pass this legislation, then … the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area,” the official said. “And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”

Climate change legislation that passed the House is stuck in the Senate, but the EPA finding Monday was seen as a boost to the U.S. delegation in Denmark trying to convince other countries that Washington is capable of taking action to follow through with any global commitments.

The economic official explained that congressional action could be better for the economy, since it would provide “compensation” for higher energy prices, especially for small businesses dealing with those higher energy costs. Otherwise, the official warned that the kind of “uncertainty” generated by unilateral EPA action would be a huge “deterrent to investment,” in an economy already desperate for jobs.

“So, passing the right kind of legislation with the right kind of compensations seems to us to be the best way to reduce uncertainty and actually to encourage investment,” the official said.

Republicans fear that the EPA will ultimately end up stepping in to regulate emissions — though many oppose the congressional legislation as well. They had urged Jackson to withdraw the finding in light of leaked e-mails from a British research center that appeared to show scientists discussing the manipulation of climate data.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., ranking Republican on the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, said Tuesday he is going to attend the Copenhagen conference to inform world leaders that despite any promises made by President Obama, no new laws will be passed in the United States until the “scientific fascism” ends.

Go, James, go!

From PowerLine:

The federal government is trying to take control over our lives via government medicine, cap and trade, and more. …

Having the far left in control of both the executive and legislative branches is a terrible thing, but on the plus side, it is clarifying: people actually have to think about where they stand on the big issue of freedom vs. socialism. Or, in other words, freedom vs. slavery.

The game isn’t over yet, but we have, roughly speaking, a first-quarter score, and so far freedom is ahead. Rasmussen finds that 76% of Americans favor a free market economy, compared to 10% who favor an economy managed by the government. More fundamentally than anything else, this explains why the Democrats face such an uphill struggle in their effort to remake America in a left-wing image.

Yes. But why didn’t enough people think about it before they put the socialists in power? If Republicans regain Congress in 2010 and the presidency in 2012, will they shrink government, reduce welfare dependency, and above all make the necessary changes in schooling so that new generations will grow up knowing the value of freedom?

This is a way to lose a war –

Stephen Brown writes at Front Page:

It makes one wonder how the West is ever going to win the war against radical Islam. …

Three navy SEALs have been charged for allegedly abusing a terrorist leader they had captured in Iraq last September.

The SEALs’ long-sought target, Ahmed Hashim Abed, is believed to have been the mastermind behind one of the most infamous incidents of the Iraq war: the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater security personnel in Fallujah in 2004. The four men were attacked when transporting supplies and had their bodies burned and dragged through the streets. Two of the corpses were then hung from a Euphrates River bridge.

Abed, the alleged planner of this barbarism, claims the navy’s elite commandos had punched him after his capture and that “he had the bloody lip to prove it.”…

Most right-thinking people would feel that, in the middle of a war, three such brave and highly-skilled warfare specialists, whose expensive training the American taxpayer has funded, should not be facing a demoralizing criminal trial over such a relatively minor matter that may not even have happened.

As far as legality is concerned, terrorists like Abed are lucky to be left among the living after their capture. As conservative columnist Thomas Sowell rightly points out, Islamic terrorists have never followed the Geneva Convention regarding the rules of warfare, as can be easily discerned in the case of the Blackwater security guards alone. More importantly, however, the terrorists themselves are not covered by the Convention’s provisions.

“Neither the Constitution of the United states nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law,” writes Sowell.

Legally, under the Convention’s terms, the American military in wartime has the right to shoot any captured enemy not in uniform. Sowell states, “There was a time when everyone understood this” and cites World War Two’s Battle of the Bulge as an example. German troops caught in American uniforms during that battle were shot almost immediately and without trial. Their executions were even filmed and shown years later on American television with no fuss ever made regarding legality.

But in the charges against the three Navy SEALs, one can detect the liberal media’s invisible hand. After the media-induced hysteria about the Abu Ghraib scandal, where American service personnel were rightly punished for subjecting detainees to abuse, some of it no worse than frat party pranks, the American military is supersensitive about the treatment of detainees. It knows the liberal media would love another prisoner mistreatment scandal that can sell papers or earn networks higher ratings as well as simultaneously be used as a stick to beat an American institution it has never liked.

And it is not as if liberals in the media have ever actually cared about Iraqi prisoners. Just the opposite. For 24 years they hypocritically ignored the real suffering of the thousands of people who were tortured and murdered under Saddam Hussein in Abu Ghraib. But that did not stop them from blowing up the scandal involving the American military into something that appeared to merit a second Nuremburg Trials.

This need for scandal that can be turned into a headline, however, has been of greater service to the Islamists in Afghanistan. There, the controversy about civilian deaths caused by American and NATO troops led to a change in their Rules of Engagement (ROE) this year. It is now much more difficult for western forces to drop smart bombs or missiles on targets where civilians may be present. One report states lawyers now have to be consulted and a casualty analysis made before every smart bomb or missile attack. …

Due to the ROE change, one military publication states the Taliban are making greater use of human shields. Taliban fighters spend time in villages or compounds where civilians are present and also bring civilians, whether willing or unwilling, with them as human shields when they go on operations. This has led to their avoiding attacks, in which they earlier would have been killed.

And with the fight becoming more difficult and dangerous for American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, this can only spell bad news.

By Andrew Walden:

Earlier this month, the Obama administration moved to transfer alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from the military justice system at Guantanamo Bay to the jurisdiction of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Behind this move away from the military tribunal system, which delivered justice so effectively at Nuremburg, is an $8.5 million lobbying effort by the so-called “John Adams Project” launched in April, 2008 by the American Civil Liberties Union.

With the endorsement of Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno, former boss of Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder, as well as former President Jimmy Carter, FBI and CIA chief William Webster, and others from both Republican and Democratic administrations, the ACLU‘s victory on behalf of the man sometimes described as “al Qaeda’s CEO” is also a defeat in the U.S.-led war on terror. Thanks to the ACLU, a terrorist like KSM will now enjoy the constitutional rights reserved for American citizens.

The civilian trial of a leading terrorist is the culmination of a years-long campaign by the ACLU to handicap U.S. efforts in the war on terror. The ACLU responded to the 9/11 attacks with the formation of its so-called National Security Project. Under the leadership of the ACLU and its ideological affiliate, the so-called Center for Constitutional Rights, hundreds of lawyers from top law firms have worked without pay to “serve the caged prisoners,” as they call the terrorist detainees in American custody. Their assault on the courts, combined with Democratic electoral gains in 2006 and 2008, has seriously undermined the military commission system. …

Their excuse is that they are safeguarding civil and constitutional rights. But as such rights do not extend to alien attackers, it’s  a thin and feeble pretext for doing what they are so passionately engaged upon that they do it free of charge. Their real aim is deeply malign: to damage America.

To the ALCU and its liberal allies, the al-Qaeda defendants are merely pawns in a larger game aimed at shackling the American and international forces who have been fighting al-Qaeda since 9/11.

Many of the ACLU’s campaigns have taken place under the “National Security Project.” Led by its CAIR-affiliated director, Jameel Jaffer, it reveals a broader picture of ACLU’s ongoing sabotage of American national security. …

Walden gives a number of examples to back up what he’s saying, including –

ACLU v. DOD –the ACLU seeks to … to go after individual US and international military and intelligence personnel — and after defense contractors if the right kind of precedent is created in Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc . John Adams Project operatives are also photographing CIA agents and giving the photos to Guantanamo detainees in order to generate torture allegations.

In Amnesty v. McConnell, the ACLU seeks to eliminate the right of the US government to spy without warrant on international telecommunication traffic. This is a right exercised by Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush and now by Obama–as well as many Presidents before them. An ACLU victory in this case could subject numerous US military and intelligence personnel telephone companies and military contractors to criminal or civil prosecution by or on behalf of jihadists in US or foreign courts. …

The ACLU is seeking to extend constitutional rights to hostile foreign nationals living outside the US and to protect armed activities conducted partly or wholly outside the US. As the KSM trials suggest, it also has a sympathetic ear in the Obama administration.

For instance, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder was a senior partner in the Covington & Burling law firm, which currently represents 16 Guantanamo detainees. Holder’s C&B law partner David Remes stripped to his underwear at a July 14, 2008 Yemeni news conference to demonstrate the strip-searches he claims are the most serious “torture” inflicted on detainees. Strip searches are a daily standard procedure in US and international prisons housing common criminals. But in the eyes of Holder’s former partner, this procedure is too debasing to be applied to jihadists. Remes soon left the firm to work on so-called “human rights” cases full time. …

The ACLU … wants to see all the Guantanamo detainees given civilian trials. The ACLU strategy has the potential to create a web of interlocking decisions and precedents that would serve to establish a basis for criminal prosecutions and more civil lawsuits by al Qaeda members against the US military personnel, contractors, Bush administration officials, and intelligence officers who have pursued them since 9/11.

If the ACLU is even partially successful, Americans and foreign allies who have risked their lives to pursue al Qaeda may find themselves in court answering to charges brought by the jihadists. With the civilian trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the ACLU is one step closer to that destructive goal.

Is this not civil war being fought by lawyers through the law courts? Or is it revolution?

By David Horowitz:

The traitor class is easily defined as people who can’t identify a self-declared enemy of the United States even after he has killed 3,000 innocent people in an act of self-described holy war and is prepared to provide his talents and services gratis to help the enemy combatant attack this own country.

Scott Fenstermaker is an attorney for Covington Burling, a white shoe law firm which has provided millions of dollars in pro bono legal work to Gitmo terrorists. A Covington partner is the brother of Weather terrorist Kathy Boudin, and the lawyer organizing the Gitmo pro bono defense team is family friend and political comrade Michael Ratner, head of the terrorist-supporting Center for Constitutional Rights, who has spent his life defending America’s enemies and serving anti-American causes.

If you can’t describe the 3000 innocent victims of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as “murdered” and your first move is to describe your own government’s case as propaganda, and you are devising a case to “justify” the evil deed your client has committed and won’t say that you would be upset if your country were to lose the case, and also if you’re a Jew and don’t have any problem defending an Islamic Nazi who beheaded Daniel Pearl after forcing him to say “I’m a Jew, I’m a Jew” — there can be only one explanation. You believe in the justification defense you are preparing, you think America and the Jews are guilty and deserve what they get, and you are a traitor. And much worse — only words are inadequate to describe just how low on the human scale you have sunk.

Yes. And who else belongs in the traitor class?

Doesn’t Attorney-General Eric Holder, who is giving the terrorists this golden opportunity to hurt Americans again, also belong in it? He was a senior partner in the Covington & Burling law firm.

And Barack Obama who approved the scheme?

And the media men and women who praise it?

And all those who falsely accuse Israel of deliberately harming civilians in Gaza, but have not an audible word to say against the Muslim terrorists who deliberately murdered 3,000 civilians in America?  Are they not all traitors to civilization, and to humanity?