Tribunals vs. Courts

President Bush signed a law recently providing for military tribunals to try terrorists being held at Guantanamo and prohibiting their torture, while allowing US intelligence agencies the use of needed information-gathering techniques. But to hear liberals' reaction, you'd think he signed a fatwa.

Military tribunals in the US are nothing new: General George Washington tried Benedict Arnold's British conspirator by military tribunal and ordered him hanged within days of his capture. Nazi saboteurs, along with their American conspirators were captured on U.S. soil during World War II and were tried in secret by military commission and promptly executed. Julius and Ethel Rosenburg, both American citizens and communists, were executed for their passing of classified A-bomb secrets to the Soviets. And the trials at Nuremberg after WWII were a form of military tribunal.

Yet in a related story last month, Lynne Stewart, one of the most anti-American lawyer radicals of the last 40 years was given a 28-month sentence after being found guilty last year of aiding and abetting terrorists. The jury recommend a 30-year sentence, but Clinton-appointee Judge John Koeltl, apparently influenced by Stewart's George Soros-financed defense, handed down the lighter sentence.

Stewart was the attorney for Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind cleric mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Literally from his prison cell, Stewart helped Rahman communicate with his Egyptian-based group of murderous terrorists here and overseas. A New York jury found her guilty last year and recommended a 30-year sentence, effectively a life sentence for the 68 year old Stewart. Yet Koetl ignored the jury's recommendation, and even recognized Stewart for her "public service, not only to her clients, but to the nation" for representing members of the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. Representing the Black Panthers, a Marxist radical terror group in the 1960s, and the Weather Underground, another left-wing seditious anti-war terror group of the same period, should have been clear evidence of Stewart's sedition, and should have resulted in an even longer sentence. But in Loetl's view, Stewart's career of radical anti-Americanism was worthy of praise. Now Stewart and her champion Soros can effectively clog the criminal judicial system with years of appeals - she's effectively been set free.

These two stories present a glaring contrast as to what will happen if the Democrats are allowed to treat terrorism as a criminal law issue. Treason and acts of war differ from civil and criminal acts, and US law treats them differently; the former is military justice, the later is not. Further, enemy combatants are not entitled to the protections afforded under US law such as a trial by jury. Imagine a years-long process of prosecuting through the courts each and every one of these several hundred captured terrorists being held at Gitmo. And even if they are found guilty, there's always the appeals process, adding even more years to each case. And as we've seen with the Stewart case, some left-wing ideologues with deep pockets - George Soros comes immediately to mind - are willing to fund their defense ad infinitum.

But dragging these cases out is exactly what the liberals want to do. After all, liberals see the terrorists as freedom fighters, fighting the good fight to stem the spread of American Imperialism, embodied as the Great Satan. Yet acting against their country in time of war, they are traitors, too, and just like Benedict Arnold and the Rosenburgs, they deserve the same swift justice.