Category Archives: Law

Saddam’s Sentencing

Saddam’s sentencing must be seen in the context of an Iraq that has been decimated by an illegal and immoral invasion and is awash with blood spilled by hundreds of mini-tyrants who’ve replaced the secular Saddam. These fulltime, rather than occasional, murderers are exacting their revenge upon their neighbors. Remove one Saddam, who kept a lid on the cauldron of crime and corruption that is Iraq, and there’ll be another waiting to take his place—and another and another. Just like a shark’s teeth.

The trial, in which every requirement of the 6th Amendment was flouted, did not even qualify as a show-trial. At the rate at which trial attorneys were being eliminated, the proceedings had to be clandestine and were thoroughly corrupted.

The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution is a better metaphor for justice coming out of terror-riddled Iraq; the Revolutionary Assembly better approximates the Iraqi court. Terror during the French Revolution was, after all, executed by popular demand.

Saddam's Sentencing

Iraq, Justice, Law

A Republic, if You Can Keep It

America, Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Individual Rights, Law, Natural Law

Yesterday Bush signed “The Military Commissions Act of 2006.” I went in search for a libertarian analysis, but found only a few splenetic screeds. While perfectly understandable, these execrations do nothing to dissect the implications of the Bill for Americans. As I read them, I knew I ought to be furious about torture. However, too little was being said about the erosion of due process, constitutional protections and the accretion of executive power.

Libertarians need to cite chapter and verse in the actual Bill and then logically and calmly explain its implications for Americans. (It is very possible that, because of his visceral contempt for the Constitution as a so-called statist document, the anarchist can’t rise to the occasion. However, he may want to bear in mind that to the extent the Constitution comports with natural law, it’s both laudable and legitimate.)

In any case, right or wrong, to security-crazed Americans, the constant squealing about torture is a signal to switch off, as it conjures the namby-pamby liberal whose concerns are, overwhelmingly, with the “evil doers.” Readers are likelier to be swayed by arguments that address the possibility of detention without trial of US citizens and the sundering of habeas corpus and the separation of powers.

Finally, I found this, which does just that. This piece from Reason offers a gist of the administration’s impetus vis-a-vis the Bill. This next piece, however, is unhelpful. Libertarians will get its Bastiatian thrust, but, bar some left-liberals, the rest will find it smarmy and juvenile. You don’t have to agree with everything Jonathan Turley says to find him inspiring. (I certainly don’t. Contra Turley, America is a republic, not a democracy, and hence not meant to manufacture “majoritarian” outcomes. And France’s centralized system is the truly ugly system.) There’s a precis of a talk he gave here. Or you can listen to him here.

Updated: Remember Reno!

America, Criminal Injustice, Government, Justice, Law

“Back in the day, the law was intended as a bulwark against government abuses. It has now become an implement of government, to be utilized by all-knowing rulers for the “greater good”—the founders’ Blackstonian view of the law has been supplanted by a Benthamism that encourages ambitious prosecutors to discard a defendant’s rights. Add the aggravating circumstances of a highly militarized federal law enforcement that shares the judiciary’s contempt for the Rights of Englishmen, and is abetted by a public dimmed by statist schools and media—and one has a recipe for disaster. A mouthful maybe, but something to ponder as another prosecutorial team gathers steam, this time in Utah, where the state, feds in tow, has been pursuing Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…”

The excerpt is from this week’s WND column, “Remember Reno!.” Comments are Welcome.

Update: Quite a few conservative, as opposed libertarian, readers wrote in to lambaste me for what they perceived as my taking up the cause of Warren Jeffs, the polygamist. Some embellished by asserting—no evidence was provided—that Jeffs, in addition to servicing all those wives of his, also sodomized many boys. But most egregious, as one reader contended, was Jeffs’ reputation for not liking blacks and their music. “This makes him extra evil,” my reader complained.

Let me be clear: I don’t take up causes; I try my best to work from principle and fact to arrive at the truth. I know; anathema in our partisan, fiction-based society.
None of the aforementioned accusations are in the indictment. Hating blacks or Jews is no crime, either—at least not in a free society, something conservatives are doing their utmost to sunder.
My points in the column, I believe, were exactly right in that they addressed evidence; not fiction or hearsay—the same stuff upon which the sexual abuse contagion was based in the 1980s (also elaborated on in “Remember Reno!”).
Since we have moved to being a fiction rather than a fact-based society, my readers’ positions don’t surprise.