Kill Them or Start Over and Risk It All

Note: for the purposes of this discussion I am linking CIA-led assassinations to lethal injection or other techniques as result of a death sentence, as the upshot is identical.

In future years, it is quite possible that my already harsh resistance to the death penalty will prove absolute, as the great Associate Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall argued long ago. In future years, it is quite possible that my already dubious views of the Central Intelligence Agency will lead to a call for abolition, as an obselete relic of a former, darker time.

But not yet.

The above link captures the hardened views of the Smugness Journal's opinion page about as well as any.

Khalid Skiekh Mohammed does not deserve US Constitutional protection, yet we should not hold him in confinement, either. We should locate people of his ilk and destroy them using the full resources of our (un)intelligent apparatus. Opponents of military commissions (such as my candidate, Senator Obama, are correct, but their remedy is far worse than the disease. The WSJ has it right: to move the trials of detainees into civilian court would effectively destroy the wall between national security and criminal investigations. The two do not mix well at all.

I am admittedly sympathetic to the argument that we should abolish the CIA as a goodwill gesture to the rest of the world and as a means to secure significant credibility at international conferences. Yet we cannot do that until some international organization has the ability and the intestinal fortitude to hunt down and kill the people who need to be killed. Arbitrary? Absolutely, but if we're going to shove the Army Field Manual down the throat of Langley, why do we need "black bag" jobs in the first place?

The principle task of the CIA is to use all of its prodigious resources outside the US to protect American citizens and to glean all possible relevant information from any country in the world at any time.

"Yet now anti-antiterror activists are attempting to make the process a referendum on the Bush Presidency or 'torture' or whatever. Purportedly the tribunals are illegitimate because they do not afford every last Miranda right or due-process safeguard of the civilian courts. The key and appropriate distinction is that foreign terrorists are not entitled to the protections of the U.S. Constitution. They also violated the laws of war -- for example, by deliberately targeting civilians. International law has always held that such people deserve fewer legal protections, much less those of civilian defendants."

Note the continued brush-off of torture by the paper, again, I cannot say what has been done or how long or how many times, but I do think different rules should exist for the CIA and its interrogators. I understand the arguments of liberals that if we do not fight this, BushCheneyCo will round up their domestic opposition next? Really? After all, as much as this president has his faults, he is not Woodrow Wilson, willing contributor to the Palmer Raids. Foreign terrorists should not receive constitutional protection from our courts. Ideally, an honest broker would do the dirty work of ending their days, but since that vision may well prove impossible, the "policeman of the world" must step in when its national security is at stake.

We could evaluate on a case-by-case basis, aside from Osama bin Laden, who is more deserving of an untimely death than KSM? Furthermore, every wannabe jihadist who demands US legal protection is an out-and-out fraud. If they truly believe what they loudly audible around the world, then they should prove happy to go down as a marytr to the "cause." If the Hague cannot deal with these villains, who else is going to perform a needed task?

Democrats and Republicans divide bitterly over the issue of Mr. Bush's War on Terror. The former believes that Guantanamo Bay should close (yes, it should, either kill these people on the battlefield with the CIA if necessary or afford them freedom), that all detainees are covered under the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution (subscribers to the "suicide pact" theory), and that the US should concede defeat in an "unwinnable" war in Mesopotamia. They're also upset about waterboarding, fortunately, they seem to treat the matter as a mere political issue. Republican voters, whilst some unabashedly rate as pro-torture (real torture, not the current trumped-up controversy) could care less about Gitmo veterans, would kill as many terrorists as they could the world over, do not believe the US Constitution forces a people to endanger their national security, and that we should "win" in Iraq, which seems code for what we could term "1945-mode" or anything goes (fire bombings, nuclear weapons, etc).

Either there are people that need to be killed or there are not. If the former, allow the CIA to do its job and keep the matter away from Congress and the Supreme Court. If the latter, abolish the CIA, submit to the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction, and withdraw from not only Iraq but the entire Middle East. Gitmo should close, but we cannot shut down our intelligence operation, even "black bag" jobs without leaving ourselves wholly unprotected because we should not have confidence in the power of international bodies to make the world a place free from al-Qaeda chieftains.

Let me conclude by saying that in the long run, the dismantling of the corrupt military-industrial complex and our overseas intelligence services would benefit mankind, Americans included. Unfortunately, the narrative as written would yield the same result (if we quit today, or began to by publicly trying KSM and his gang in civilian court) as if we broke off ties with the extraordinarily oppressive Saudi Royal Family in Riyadh: it would prove a long, long time before we saw any benefit--not in my lifetime.

In five, ten, or twenty years, I may deem it fit to argue for that radical change, but not now. September 11, 2001, is not yet a decade in the rearview mirror and I do not find myself persuaded by claims that the present administration has "gone too far."