Week of November 9, 2009
The Obama administration has taken a giant step in its march to throw in the towel in the war against radical Islam. On FoxNews this morning, Peter King said of the decision to try the soldiers of al-Qaeda — who by their own account have no country but their cause — as civilians“may be the worst decision by a U.S. president in history.”
It certainly is. It sends a signal to terrorists everywhere to attack civilians.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday that some top al-Qaeda 9/11 conspirators will be tried by jury in New York not far from the scenes of devastation that they had wrought.Predictably, Republican critics vowed to fight the decision, since they much prefer to hold people forever without trial while torturing them, sort of the way some English kings did in North America before there was that pesky American constitution. In fact, on a whole range of issues, the contemporary Republican Party is a party of medieval romanticism. Its disquisitions on when the human person begins are theological in character and rooted in assumptions even a lot of medievals would have questioned. Its faith that bankers would never steal from us and so do not need to be regulated is a form of mysticism that medievals would have applied to saints. And its fascination with arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and with torture more recalls the star chambers of yore than the deliberations at Philadelphia over 200 years ago.
The most patriotic way to honor future veterans of foreign wars is not to create any unnecessarily.