Posted on 05/18/2004 7:00:49 PM PDT by wagglebee
I once enjoyed an hour-long debate with Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz – with whom I often disagree.
But I thoroughly agree with his April 22 statement that killing terrorists is legal. He writes:
I challenge Jack Straw to distinguish Israel's killing of Rantisi from the targeting of Al-Sadr, Saddam's sons, or Osama bin Laden.
The United States Army was recently given a highly specific military order. According to the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the mission is to kill radical Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
This order to target al-Sadr for extrajudicial killing is perfectly legitimate and lawful under the laws of war. Al-Sadr is a combatant, and it is proper to kill a combatant during an ongoing war unless he surrenders first. It doesn't matter whether the combatant is a cook or bomb-maker, a private or a general.
Nor does it matter whether he wears an army uniform, a three-piece suit, or a kaffiyeh. So long as he is in the chain of command, he is an appropriate target, regardless of whether he is actually engaged in combat at the time he is killed, or is fast asleep. Of course, his killing would be extrajudicial. Military attacks against combatants are not preceded by jury trials or judicial warrants.
Al-Sadr fits squarely into any reasonable definition of combatant. He leads a militia that has declared war on American and coalition forces, as well as on civilians, both foreign and Iraqi. He is at the top of the chain of command, and it is he who presses the on-off button for the killings. Like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar Mohammed, he is a proper military target, so long as he can be killed without disproportional injury to non-combatants.
If American forces can capture him, they are permitted that option as well, but they are not required – under the laws of war – to endanger the lives of their soldiers in order to spare Al-Sadr's life. Indeed, unless Al-Sadr were to surrender, it is entirely lawful for American troops to kill him rather than to capture him if it were decided that this was tactically advantageous.
As an opponent of the death penalty – which I saw carried out as a member of the Protestant chaplain's staff at California's San Quentin Prison, I was glad when Israel abolished capital punishment – except for genocide, for which they hanged Adolf Eichmann.
But what I cannot understand is why on earth Israel has just released Mordecai Vanunu.
Steven Plaut, professor at the University of Haifa, has e-mailed me the following:
The Israeli Left is celebrating the release from prison of its great hero, Mordecai Vanunu, who had been in prison after being convicted for espionage. The Left is being more and more open about endorsing and promoting treason. The same leftists promote insurrection in the Israeli military. They denounce Israel all over the world as a "fascist" or "apartheid" state. They justify Arab terrorism and Islamofascism. And they have now adopted Vanunu as their role model.
The Bash-Israel Left has been trying to claim that Vanunu was nothing more than a man of conscience opposed to nuclearization of the Middle East. That is nonsense. Vanunu wanted to release Israeli nuclear secrets, and his leftist cheerleaders want Israel to abandon nuclear weapons, because these nukes make it harder for the Arab fascists to destroy Israel. In other words, Vanunu and his cheerleaders simply would like to see Israel annihilated, and the nukes make this more difficult.
Not convinced? Well, consider this. The very same man of conscience, Vanunu, who supposedly just thinks nukes are naught and nasty, denounced Israel when it obliterated the Iraqi nuclear plant back in 1981. I guess he opposes nuclear facilities only when they are not being used to help create an Islamic nuclear bomb.
Israel has now mindlessly let Vanunu out of prison, to the cheers of the Jews for a Second Holocaust. Vanunu also petitioned to have his Israeli citizenship revoked. I support that, but demand that the instant it be revoked, Vanunu be rearrested for being an alien illegally in the country, and then put in prison for another few decades.
Meanwhile, it is a curious point to note that Vanunu began his treason and espionage work while a student in the political science department (according to some other reports, philosophy also) at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheba. There he joined some Stalinist cells, mainly consisting of Arabs, and organized agitprop against Israel when Israel launched the 1982 Peace for Galilee Campaign in Lebanon. Vanunu also organized protests against Israel's nuclear research facilities in Dimona.
Incredibly, Vanunu the Stalinist was then hired to work in that very same Dimona facility, a demonstration of the same sort of "thinking" in Israel that later produced the Oslo debacle. As a Stalinist and as a spy serving Israel's enemies, Vanunu smuggled in a camera and took photos. Then he resigned, taking the pictures with him. He traveled through Asia, and ended up in Australia, where the British Sunday Times contacted him. Vanunu has openly stated that Israel should not exist.
The headline & term terrorist is somewhat misleading. The rationale for killing, versus arresting & trying, Sadr is not that he is a terrorist, but that he is a combatant in a military conflict. Which is exactly right. Members of organized groups engaged in armed conflict with another group or country are legitimate targets for attack in accordance with the laws of war. However, Sadr's case is clear-cut. Confusion over the status of our enemies elsewhere in the war on terror continues--look at our "detainees" in Iraq and the Afghan prisoners in Gitmo. Tradtionally an armed combatant can be killed or captured and, if captured, interrogated and held for the duration of hostilities. If the combatant is also suspected of criminal acts; i.e. killing civilians or prisoners, etc, then he is tried and sentenced as a criminal. If he is found innocent or completes his sentence, he retains his status as a combatant & goes back in with the other prisoners of war. All of that is irrespective of his status as a member or not of a regular armed force.
They DO want the terrorists to win. I believe most leftists are depressed and suicidal, but instead of turning their suicidal tendencies against themselves, they're turning them against everyone else.
Last I checked, Muslims aren’t signatores to the Geneva Convention. They can be treated as the feral animals they are, but we are too civilized for that.
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