Jihadi-Symps Feeling Their Oats

Former attorneys-general, it is said, rarely, if ever, actively litigate against the policies of an opposition administration.

Small wonder, than, that Bill Clinton's cover-upper-in-chief has chosen to sue the Bush Administration over its illegal combatant detention policy:

Former Attorney General Janet Reno and seven other former Justice Department officials filed court papers Monday arguing that the Bush Administration is setting a dangerous precedent by trying a suspected terrorist outside the court system.

It was the first time that Reno, attorney general in the Clinton administration, has spoken out against the Administration's policies on terrorism detainees, underscoring how contentious the court fight over the nation's new military commissions law has become. Former attorneys general rarely file court papers challenging administration policy.

Suspected al-Qaida sleeper agent Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is the only detainee being held in the United States.

The former prosecutors challenged the Justice Department's right to bring al-Marri before a military commission.

Remember the days when Congress passed a law addressing an issue and that was....you know, the law, settled until such time as those who opposed that law could get back control of Congress in order to repeal it? Boy that seems like a long time ago. Now you get a law passed and the Democrats don't bother to wait to get Congress back to repeal it (though they doubtless will try now, and who knows whether the freshly gelded President Bush might not sign it); they immediately shop for an oligarchist judge who will unilaterally injuct it and ride the cause celebre all the way to Olympus, where five Justices still remain who can be relied upon to legislate "the right way".

Reno's rangers are quite candid about their version of "the right way":

"The government is essentially asserting the right to hold putative enemy combatants arrested in the United States indefinitely whenever it decides not to prosecute those people criminally _ perhaps because it would be too difficult to obtain a conviction, perhaps because a motion to suppress evidence would raise embarrassing facts about the government's conduct, or perhaps for other reasons," the former Justice Department officials said.

"Putative"? Note how obsequiously eager they are to give al-Marri the benefit of the doubt, and so seditious they are of the Bush Administration's "putative" motivations. Could not those "other reasons" be the protection of the American civilian population against more devastating terrorist attacks? Does that possibility even occur to these "former Justice Department officials"?

It would seem not:

Some of the eight attorneys named in the document are now in private practice and represent detainees at the military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Several grafs further down we get to the unholy grail:

The former prosecutors wrote that they worried the government would increasingly use the law to avoid criminal trials "and the rights associated with them, such as the defendant's right to counsel and the government's obligation to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt." [emphasis added]

Here we go again. Islamist terrorists are not criminals entitled to U.S. constitutional rights, nor are they prisoners of war entitled to Geneva Convention protections. They are illegal enemy combatants who abide by no rules of war and no international law, waging a war of annihilation against the West in general and the United States (and Israel) in particular.

NeoBolsheviks will never acknowledge this gruesome truth because to do so would be to acknowledge not just that we're at war but at what kind of war we're at. It would be to admit that we really do have to wage a war of annihilation against the terror states, a wide-ranging global conflict without "international" approval or sanction not costly only in comparison to the cost of not waging it.

A war that we are, frankly, not waging, but which protecting the American public at large from al Qaeda sleeper agents like Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is the utter least that can be done. And these neoBolsheviks, these pacifistic absolutists (plus their two pet RINOs) cannot abide even that.

If you needed any more evidence that Campaign 2008 is already underway, there it is.