As I view the dusk fading to darkness, it has been a really great weekend. Saw three great singing groups last night in Mansfield, OH and loved ever moment of it, had safe journey down there and back and slept well. Today has been excellent with getting to attend a spiritually uplifting workshop with a young man and former student that God has drawn us together for His Will to be done. The meteor I wrote about a few days ago is now a smoldering ash so life goes on and God continues to amaze me. But there is one underscore to our life today in America that increasingly concerns me ... ANGER!
My reality check into the depths of this rage came this week with the degree of venomous rhetoric about a couple of articles I posted to Facebook. Regardless of the topic, I watched the swords of anger clashing on my FB page in opposing views to the article. That is great for I select the articles with one criteria; does that capture the most impactful issue in our world today as it implicates our future? But the degree of angst splashed on comments about the article left me realizing the degree of real, verifiable fear, worry and anger that abounds in our world today.
Americans are angry with the economics, the politics, the on-going global issues Americans now seem incapable or unwilling to weld presence and force of influence upon. Americans are angry with race, campaigning instead of leading. Americans are angry such as with all the things Congress has created and should be working on, banning tobacco from Major League Baseball seems more important. I had to just sigh when I watched that unfold. The list is long so I will cease the listing to make my point.
Those of you that really know me know a doomsday prophet is not one of my gifts. But the seeds of anger can erupt into full scale revolt and that is what I see as I peer across the bow of this great ship. In my lifetime I never would have thought I would see some of the things happening in our world as I do in our current time. One, because I am so close to it every day, is student loan debt. There is anger, justified anger, building on this as students begin to realize the anchor they are carrying around into their adult working lives with six digit debt burdens. I literally hurt when I realize each semester the hundreds of thousands of dollars a single class is staring at for years to come. What that causes me to do, however, is work even harder to insure that each student receives the very, very best of me for they certainly are deserving of it. I mean, after all, they are OUR future, right, so it is the return on investment that I look toward in the capital expenditure for each student until one proves they are not worthy. And yes, I do have an occasional one that proves unworthy.
In my closing, I wish to say once more that I am extremely encouraged by the students I get to see and work with. They are a great generation tooled much more strongly than my generation at the same age in so many ways. But one tremendous concern I feel heavily is the family model so many of my students have not been blessed to experience thus to emulate. Single parent, blended, multi-partner relationships are the new norm and how that projects into this new generation is, well, frightening which I think of the potential implications. THAT angers me!
This is a great nation, it has been greater, but realizing with all the noise of our world, the world's villagers still look to the United States of America to calm the fears, soothe the hurts, attack the bad guys and let's them sleep at night and have a meal when they wake up. THAT is the America I grew up in, workd for, served for, and long to have back. America has chosen to step aside from our God and I absolutely believe that same God is letting us have a painful, acidic taste of just how bad it can be without Him. As Bill Gaither so wonderfully wrote:
Without Him I could not nothing
Without Him I'd surely fail
Without Him life would be hopeless
Like a ship without a sail
Seems pretty descriptive of America 2011 doesn't it! By the way, this is fixable for it, like life, is a choice. Be blessed on Sunday. Go to church, be part of a worship experience, love somebody you may not necessarily like. As a great friend of mine likes to say, so correctly ... BE NICE, Mr Williams.
The United States can cross Anwar al-Awlaki off the al Qaeda roster. The Yemeni-American cleric killed by a U.S. drone strike on Friday was linked to the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit in 2009, the shooting spree at Fort Hood in Texas that killed 13 that same year, and the near-miss car bombing of Times Square in 2010.
Yet, from the howls on the left, you would never know that President Barack Obama had won another victory in the war on terror. Even as details of the operation leaked out, critics claimed that our government had "assassinated" an American citizen without due process.
Showing that antiwar fervor is a bipartisan disease, Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) immediately went on the offensive. "Al-Awlaki was born here; he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes," declared the Republican presidential candidate. "If the American people accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it's sad."
Such fevered accusations echo weightier claims from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the United Nations. Representing Awlaki's father, the ACLU sued the Obama administration last year on the theory that the Constitution forbids the government from trying to kill an American citizen for allegedly joining the enemy. According to the ACLU, the United States must arrest Awlaki and bring him home for trial. U.N. officials also issued a report last year suggesting that U.S. drones violate the human rights of suspected terrorists because of the lack of due process.
Last December, however, a federal court in Washington dismissed the ACLU's case. It observed that judges had little ability to intervene in wartime targeting decisions and that Awlaki always had the option of returning home to prove his innocence.
Today's critics wish to return the United States to the pre-9/11 world of fighting terrorism only with the criminal justice system. Worse yet, they get the rights of a nation at war terribly wrong. Awlaki's killing in no way violates the prohibition on assassination, first declared by executive order during the Ford administration. As American government officials have long concluded, assassination is an act of murder for political purposes. Killing Martin Luther King Jr. or John F. Kennedy is assassination. Shooting an enemy soldier in wartime is not. In World War II, the United States did not carry out an assassination when it sent long-range fighters to shoot down an air transport carrying the Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
American citizens who join the enemy do not enjoy a roving legal force-field that immunizes them from military reprisal. President Abraham Lincoln confronted this question at the outset of the Civil War.
Under the Ron Paul-ACLU worldview, Lincoln could not order Union troops to fire on Confederates without a trial and should have released them all from military prison because they remained citizens (a view shared, incidentally, by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of Dred Scott v. Sandford). What if Union officers could have seized Gens. Robert E. Lee and Albert Johnston at the start of the war?
"Unquestionably, if we had seized and held them, the insurgent cause would be much weaker," Lincoln wrote. "But no one of them had then committed any crime defined in the law" and a court would order them released. Instead, Lincoln concluded, the laws of war must allow the United States to treat its own citizens as enemies when they take up arms in rebellion.
Supreme Court opinions have upheld Lincoln's principle. During World War II, the FBI caught eight German saboteurs trying to sneak into the U.S. and at least one of them was a citizen. On reviewing their military trial and death sentences, the Justices declared: "Citizenship in the United States of an enemy belligerent does not relieve him from the consequences" (Ex Parte Quirin, 1942). "Citizens who associate themselves with the military arm of the enemy government, and with its aid, guidance and direction enter this country bent on hostile acts are enemy belligerents." A nation at war has the right to kill enemy belligerents in war.
The war on terror's unprecedented nature only makes Lincoln's rule even more critical. Al Qaeda has no territory, population or conventional armed forces. It draws its operatives from any country and trains them to covertly infiltrate peaceful societies to launch surprise attacks on civilian targets. If the U.S. were to reserve criminal justice rules for American terrorists, it would only encourage al Qaeda to recruit citizens and ease their path into this country. American al Qaeda operatives would be free from targeting, and efforts to stop them—here or abroad—would require the whole system of warrants, judges, Miranda warnings and lawyers.
Realizing this, the Supreme Court has made clear that the old rules would apply even in this new war. In 2004, it upheld the military detention of Yaser Hamdi, a Saudi Arabian captured during the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan who had been born in the U.S. "There is no bar to this Nation's holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant," the Court's plurality agreed. "A citizen, no less than an alien, can be part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners and engaged in an armed conflict against the United States."
Simply because the Obama administration has the legal right to use force to kill members of the enemy does not mean it must always pull the trigger. It should have good reasons to believe an American has joined al Qaeda. Intelligence reasons favor capturing al Qaeda leaders whenever possible to gain information. But as the Obama administration hastily rushes for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. will be losing the bases, infrastructure and practice that make possible the high tempo of drone and special-forces operations. The U.S. may be left with no opportunities for capture, and precious few chances to kill.
Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03, and is co-editor of the recently published "Confronting Terror" (Encounter Books).
Yet, from the howls on the left, you would never know that President Barack Obama had won another victory in the war on terror. Even as details of the operation leaked out, critics claimed that our government had "assassinated" an American citizen without due process.
Showing that antiwar fervor is a bipartisan disease, Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) immediately went on the offensive. "Al-Awlaki was born here; he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes," declared the Republican presidential candidate. "If the American people accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it's sad."
Such fevered accusations echo weightier claims from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the United Nations. Representing Awlaki's father, the ACLU sued the Obama administration last year on the theory that the Constitution forbids the government from trying to kill an American citizen for allegedly joining the enemy. According to the ACLU, the United States must arrest Awlaki and bring him home for trial. U.N. officials also issued a report last year suggesting that U.S. drones violate the human rights of suspected terrorists because of the lack of due process.
Last December, however, a federal court in Washington dismissed the ACLU's case. It observed that judges had little ability to intervene in wartime targeting decisions and that Awlaki always had the option of returning home to prove his innocence.
Associated Press
Rep. Ron Paul
American citizens who join the enemy do not enjoy a roving legal force-field that immunizes them from military reprisal. President Abraham Lincoln confronted this question at the outset of the Civil War.
Under the Ron Paul-ACLU worldview, Lincoln could not order Union troops to fire on Confederates without a trial and should have released them all from military prison because they remained citizens (a view shared, incidentally, by Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of Dred Scott v. Sandford). What if Union officers could have seized Gens. Robert E. Lee and Albert Johnston at the start of the war?
"Unquestionably, if we had seized and held them, the insurgent cause would be much weaker," Lincoln wrote. "But no one of them had then committed any crime defined in the law" and a court would order them released. Instead, Lincoln concluded, the laws of war must allow the United States to treat its own citizens as enemies when they take up arms in rebellion.
Supreme Court opinions have upheld Lincoln's principle. During World War II, the FBI caught eight German saboteurs trying to sneak into the U.S. and at least one of them was a citizen. On reviewing their military trial and death sentences, the Justices declared: "Citizenship in the United States of an enemy belligerent does not relieve him from the consequences" (Ex Parte Quirin, 1942). "Citizens who associate themselves with the military arm of the enemy government, and with its aid, guidance and direction enter this country bent on hostile acts are enemy belligerents." A nation at war has the right to kill enemy belligerents in war.
The war on terror's unprecedented nature only makes Lincoln's rule even more critical. Al Qaeda has no territory, population or conventional armed forces. It draws its operatives from any country and trains them to covertly infiltrate peaceful societies to launch surprise attacks on civilian targets. If the U.S. were to reserve criminal justice rules for American terrorists, it would only encourage al Qaeda to recruit citizens and ease their path into this country. American al Qaeda operatives would be free from targeting, and efforts to stop them—here or abroad—would require the whole system of warrants, judges, Miranda warnings and lawyers.
Realizing this, the Supreme Court has made clear that the old rules would apply even in this new war. In 2004, it upheld the military detention of Yaser Hamdi, a Saudi Arabian captured during the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan who had been born in the U.S. "There is no bar to this Nation's holding one of its own citizens as an enemy combatant," the Court's plurality agreed. "A citizen, no less than an alien, can be part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners and engaged in an armed conflict against the United States."
Simply because the Obama administration has the legal right to use force to kill members of the enemy does not mean it must always pull the trigger. It should have good reasons to believe an American has joined al Qaeda. Intelligence reasons favor capturing al Qaeda leaders whenever possible to gain information. But as the Obama administration hastily rushes for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. will be losing the bases, infrastructure and practice that make possible the high tempo of drone and special-forces operations. The U.S. may be left with no opportunities for capture, and precious few chances to kill.
Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03, and is co-editor of the recently published "Confronting Terror" (Encounter Books).