Today’s WSJ “Opinion Journal” feature article, “The ABA Goes to War,” contains these sentiments:

Sometimes, as we stare at the ceiling at night, we wonder if these columns are too hard on lawyers. And then we go to work and hear what defense attorney Neal Sonnett said recently before the American Bar Association:

‘Our system does not work, democracy does not live, unless we are willing to give the same rights to the worst of us as to the best of us.’

That was just before the ABA voted 286-147 for a resolution calling illegitimate any U.S. military tribunal that doesn’t treat al Qaeda captives exactly like any American criminal defendant.

Earth to ABA: There’s one small problem here. The guys you’re talking about aren’t ‘us.’ Those guys are ‘them,’ foreign enemies who want to kill ‘us.’ They’ve already killed more than a few.

[…]The abdication of reason here is astonishing. The ABA shows not the slightest recognition that the traditional rules of war might be hard to apply in a conflict in which combatants wear suits and ties and crash hijacked civilian jets into office towers. It gives no running room to an Administration that has to define the application of legal and just-war principles to captives who assert that if they are released they will return to the jihad to kill still more innocent Americans.

Even more insulting is the idea here that military commissions are nothing but kangaroo courts, an implicit endorsement of the 1960s canard that ‘military justice’ is an oxymoron. In testimony before Congress, retired Major General Michael J. Nardotti Jr., formerly the Army’s judge advocate general, noted that the conviction rate in the approximately 2,600 military trials of Japanese and German soldiers after World War II was about 85%. That’s less than the conviction rate today for most federal courts. Fewer than 100 were executed.

Now, here’s protein wisdom’s Victor Milkwhite on February 6th, writing on the very same Neal Sonnett speech:

Hmm. ‘…are willing to give the same rights to the worst of us as to the best of us,’ you say? Okay. But doesn’t our legal system already provide for such conditions, Mr. Sonnett? For citizens of our country, I mean? Those captured in war — on foreign soil– who aren’t citizens of our country aren’t entitled to the niceties of our legal system unless we’re kind enough to grant such considerations to them, right? And why would we want to grant such considerations to those we know are trying desperately to kill us?

It so happens there’s nothing in the ABA’s actual ‘recommendation’ that I disagree with (presumption of innocence, guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and unaminous death-sentence verdicts all seem reasonable to me) — but their posturing and pandering is altogether loathsome. (As if the military were seriously contemplating summary executions… Great, you’ve made yourself heard. Now back to your croissants, Protectors of the Good…)

protein Wisdom. Born to gloat.

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