Legal jihad, from Henry Mark Holzer at FrontPage.
First, from the editor’s note:
The article below by Henry Mark Holzer discusses the Supreme Court’s recent decision to give constitutional protection to foreign “enemy combatants.” This development, which epitomizes activist judges “legislating from the bench,” overwrites decades of precedents and undermines the country’s ability to fight the War on Terror. Meanwhile, terrorists and their radical America-hating lawyers are lining up to find and exploit loopholes in the rulings that may ultimately set a large number of criminals and murderers free — and a large number of Americans to their graves.
The advocates of these terrorists come mainly from two leftist organizations with a long history of defending the dregs of American (and now Islamic) society: the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG). These groups have teamed up to challenge the rights of America to defend our jihadist enemies.
The CCR, which was founded by radical leftist attorneys William Kuntsler and Arthur Kinoy, has a long record of defending and identifying with our enemies. Like the CCR, the NLG never met an anti-American, anti-capitalist, or anti-Semite it didn’t like. Both, for instance, stand firmly behind accused terrorist and former University of South Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian, who awaits trial for providing material aid to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
The NLG is at the forefront of fighting on behalf of Guantanamo terrorist prisoners. It actively opposes legislation designed to prevent terror attacks, supports other terrorist groups like the Basque Separatists, and routinely passes out literature in Arabic to immigrants and visitors so they can “know their rights” with respect to U.S. investigators. “Talking to the FBI or other agents can be dangerous,” says one NLG pamphlet.
The most notorious terrorist advocate currently is NLG member Lynne Stewart, who is now on trial herself for aiding and abetting the terrorist leader Omar Abdel Rahman. Stewart is a self-proclaimed champion of terrorism and an avowed Communist whose heroes include Lenin, Mao and Ho Chi Minh. Rahman’s followers perpetrated the first World Trade Center bombing and had planned other attacks on NYC. While acting as his lawyer, Stewart disseminated instructions to Rahman’s followers….
And from Holzer:
Rumsfeld v. Padilla. An American citizen, Jose Padilla (the so-called “dirty bomber”) was arrested in Chicago, brought to New York, later designated an “enemy combatant,” and given into military custody in South Carolina. Assigned counsel sought habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (in Manhattan), challenging Padilla’s detention.
In a narrow technical decision, the Supreme Court held that Padilla’s lawyer had sued in the wrong jurisdiction. Since the “immediate custodian” who had control of enemy combatant Padilla was the warden of the naval brig in South Carolina, that jurisdiction, not New York, was where the alleged dirty bomber’s case belonged. Accordingly, the Supreme Court told Padilla that if he wanted to challenge the detention, he would have to re-file his case in the South Carolina federal court. Thus, Padilla decided nothing substantive””the case only further defined the statutory meaning of “immediate custodian.” (Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer were prepared, knowingly, to misinterpret the habeas corpus statute and reach the merits because Padilla’s claims, apparently unlike the plain meaning of a venerable federal statute, were “important”)….
There follow details of other important cases. Read it all.
To paraphrase Godfather Don Corleone: Radical lawyers with word processors can do more harm than 100 terrorists with machine guns.