Liberty and Tyranny by Mark R. Levin Read Free Book Online

center over a period of years has been made controversial. Obama also issued an executive order that will close the facility within a year of his taking office. And the insistence on treating the detained terrorists as soldiers under international law (the Geneva Conventions), 16 which specifically excludes them from such a designation since they are waging war illegally, and also treating them as quasi-American citizens for the purpose of applying constitutional-like due process standards in determining their fate, flies in the face of legal and historical precedent. How does American society benefit from these approaches? Terrorists, the earliest of whom were pirates, have never been considered equivalent to regular armed forces by any president up to now. Granting new rights to terrorists, which makes their barbarism more difficult to stop and their schemes more difficult to uncover, is not morally defensible.
    While empowering the terrorist with new rights, thereby increasing the threat against Americans, the Statist claims violations of Americans’ civil liberties with the passage of the post-9/11 Patriot Act. As former terrorist prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained, the act “removes obstacles that have for years prevented the law-enforcement and counterintelligence sides of the government from pooling information to confront the terrorist threat. [And] it ushers several long-established investigative techniques into the era of 21st-century technology, bringing them to bear on terrorism with the same effectiveness they have long exhibited in rooting out far-less-heinous crimes, such as drug trafficking and health-care fraud.” The law provides for judicial review at every important stage as well. 17 The Statist also has opposed the interception of enemy communications, such as email and cell phone contacts, without approval from a court. But his position is contrary to all legal precedent, historical practice, and highly impractical, given the speed by which such communications occur. Yet again he claims the practice threatens Americans’ civil liberties. Where is the actual evidence of widespread civil liberties’ abuses against American citizens? It is nonexistent.
    The war against terrorism requires infiltration, interception, detention, and interrogation, all of which are aimed at preventing another catastrophic attack against American citizens within the United States and American soldiers on the battlefield. The post-9/11 mix of laws and policies instituted by President George W. Bush, which are intended to protect American society from mortal threats, did, in fact, succeed in securing the American people’s unalienable rights within the framework of the Constitution. The Statist knows this, but he is intolerant of the successful leadership of others, for it delays his own ascendancy. He must denigrate those who obstruct him. And once in power, his threshold for actual civil liberties violations is often lowered.
    During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt ordered the unconstitutional internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans, which was upheld by an activist Supreme Court. 18 Roosevelt remains among the Statist’s most adored leaders and the Court among his most venerated institutions. When Robert Kennedy served as attorney general of the United States in the 1960s, he did nothing to stop the illegal bugging of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s telephone by the FBI. 19 Today, the federal Justice Department building is named after Kennedy. Under President Bill Clinton, the National Security Agency launched the Echelon surveillance program, in which the U.S. government routinely intercepts international email, telephone, and fax communications of citizen and terrorist alike. 20 It drew virtually no attention from self-identified civil libertarian groups.
    For the Conservative, there is no doubt that the relentless efforts of the Statist to criminalize war—by dragging strategic and operational decisions into the