The Sunshine Empire

The debate over whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should face justice in a New York City courtroom or continue in some extra-legal limbo counter to American values has made me revisit a strain of thought for most conservatives. In the days after the horrific attacks that brought down the twin towers, Republicans and conservatives insisted that the tactic of terrorism should be treated as a conventional military opponent and that to treat it as criminality somehow was a soft way of fighting said tactic. The question of why produces little in the way of practical difference and amounts to nothing more than politics.

There is no argument that the attacks of September 11th were a boon to the political fortunes of the Republican party. The Republican majority in the House was as small as ever and it was gone in the Senate after the elections of 2000. Republicans only held the Senate by nature of Dick Cheney assuming the Vice Presidency. George W. Bush has won the Presidency but had done so by losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes. Before the year was out the defection of Jim Jeffords had lost the Senate for the GOP. After the attacks Bush was smart again and using the security issue and the looming Iraq war Republicans had consolidated their power and controlled all arms of government after the 2002 midterm. In the new War on Terror we were told that the past way of dealing with the issue as a criminal matter was weak and had contributed to the attacks being able to occur. But why?

By all historical accounts former President Clinton was extremely concerned with the coming terrorist threat but was rendered powerless to have any changes pushed through a Congress more concerned with his lying to a grand jury about an extramarital affair than the safety of the American people. Bush, while on his month long vacation in August of 2001 was given the famous memo “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”. As much as it may be a stretch to say that Bush allowed, or his carelessness allowed the attack, the move to denigrate using the American legal system was more an effort to place blame on the former administration.

Today as we hear the political right hyperventilate with exhortations of fire and brimstone that KSM facing a federal court in New York will obviously cause, the actual practice of the federal government when it comes to using the Constitution and the federal courts for terrorists runs counter to their rhetoric. They insist to us that as wonderful as the American legal system is, the Constitution does not apply to these terrorists because they are not Americans. But on its face that’s the easiest of the arguments. The U.S. Constitution is used to prosecute thousands of non-citizens every day, but KSM somehow falls into a different category than those prosecutions. Republicans claim that bringing terrorists into New York City and other places in the homeland is extremely risky and unprecedented. But reality is pesky in these situations. The Bush Administration brought hundreds of terrorism suspects into federal courts and prosecuted them successfully without increased risk to New York City. Not one of these Republicans now predicting doom said as much as a whisper when George W. Bush carried on the same exact practice.

The brilliance of the founding fathers was that they created a constitution that guided people in morally true governance. It has successfully been used to exact justice no matter who the perpetrator is, what their crime was, or their nation of origin. We follow the constitution because it is right and true, and it does not become invalid just because some among us are cowards. Those who would attempt to scare us into believing otherwise are not interested one bit in your safety, but in winning the next election on the wave of your fears.