Spending and Morality

Walter E. Williams

http://townhall.com/

July 9, 2014

John Boehner and Barack Obama

During last year's budget negotiation meetings, President Barack Obama told House Speaker John Boehner, "We don't have a spending problem." When Boehner responded with "But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem," Obama replied, "I'm getting tired of hearing you say that." In one sense, the president is right. What's being called a spending problem is really a symptom of an unappreciated deep-seated national moral rot. Let's examine it with a few questions.

Is it moral for Congress to forcibly use one person to serve the purposes of another? I believe that most Americans would pretend that to do so is offensive. Think about it this way. Suppose I saw a homeless, hungry elderly woman huddled on a heating grate in the dead of winter. To help the woman, I ask somebody for a $200 donation to help her out. If the person refuses, I then use intimidation, threats and coercion to take the person's money. I then purchase food and shelter for the needy woman. My question to you: Have I committed a crime? I hope that most people would answer yes. It's theft to take the property of one person to give to another.

Now comes the hard part. Would it be theft if I managed to get three people to agree that I should take the person's money to help the woman? What if I got 100, 1 million or 300 million people to agree to take the person's $200? Would it be theft then? What if instead of personally taking the person's $200, I got together with other Americans and asked Congress to use Internal Revenue Service agents to take the person's $200? The bottom-line question is: Does an act that's clearly immoral when done privately become moral when it is done collectively and under the color of law? Put another way, does legality establish morality?

For most of our history, Congress did a far better job of limiting its activities to what was both moral and constitutional. As a result, federal spending was only 3 to 5 percent of the gross domestic product from our founding until the 1920s, in contrast with today's 25 percent. Close to three-quarters of today's federal spending can be described as Congress taking the earnings of one American to give to another through thousands of handout programs, such as farm subsidies, business bailouts and welfare.

During earlier times, such spending was deemed unconstitutional and immoral. James Madison, the acknowledged father of our Constitution, said, "Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 to assist some French refugees, Madison stood on the floor of the House of Representatives to object, saying, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents." Today's Americans would crucify a politician expressing similar statements.

There may be nitwits out there who'd assert, "That James Madison guy forgot about the Constitution's general welfare clause." Madison had that covered, explaining in a letter, "If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one." Thomas Jefferson agreed, writing: Members of Congress "are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare. ... It would reduce the (Constitution) to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please."

The bottom line is that spending is not our basic problem. We've become an immoral people demanding that Congress forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another. Deficits and runaway national debt are merely symptoms of that larger problem.

Chicago Democrats a protected species on the national stage

By John Kass
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
July 9, 2013

( NBC / June 3, 2014 )

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Jimmy Fallon discuss their polar plunge earlier this year on Tuesday night's "Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon."

Prominent Chicago Democrats have had an easy time with the national media for decades — as easy as shaking a ring of keys to distract an anxious child in church.

Former Mayor Richard M. Daley rode a bicycle in photo ops and put a few plants on the roof of City Hall, leading the national news networks to cast him as the "green" mayor, not as the absolute boss of a broken and corrupt political system that piled debt on the city and drained its future for the benefit of the insiders.

President Barack Obama appeared on the late-night talk shows as the mystical healer of America's broken politics, not as some untested suit who held the hand of now-imprisoned bagman Tony Rezko while learning to cross Chicago's political streets.

And Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former chief of staff?

He hangs with Jimmy Fallon and they tell jokes about jumping into a freezing Lake Michigan. Emanuel is as cool and practiced a media manipulator as the fictional Frank Underwood in "House of Cards."

But a headline of 82 people shot in Chicago in 84 hours is embarrassing to the mayor, particularly for a mayor who sees the fifth floor of City Hall as a mere stop on the road to his national political destiny.

So he held a news conference on the Far South Side this week, a familiar exercise, full of the necessary archetypes:

Wise neighborhood matrons flanking the mayor and nodding their heads in agreement. Grieving families in support, better there at his side than out on the street asking angry questions.

They talked of the need for everyone to step up to face the crisis, from community leaders to parents, federal officials, judges — everyone except, of course, the mayor of Chicago.

And he avoided the overriding question, again and again: When are we going to hire more police officers?

"Now, a lot of people will say, 'Where were the police? What were the police doing?' That's a fair question, but not the only question," the mayor said.

"Where are the parents? Where is the community? Where are the gun laws? Where are the national leaders, so we don't have the guns of Cook County, Indiana and downstate Illinois flowing into the city?"

Rattle those keys, Mr. Mayor.

A TV reporter asked him about tired police officers who've been working overtime because he won't hire more. Another reporter asked why New York and Los Angeles have lower homicide rates than Chicago.

"Well, thank you (for) your question," Rahm said, launching into a diatribe on gun laws, rather than on police staffing.

He's good at shaking keys. And some analysts bought his talking points, agreeing with City Hall that talking of police manpower was just too easy.

Too easy? What else is left? A miracle?

According to city data, overall Police Department staffing was about 12,250 at the start of this year, down almost 900 officers from the end of 2009. The Rahmfather has been hiring police, but not at a fast enough rate to keep up with attrition.

Just about every police officer I've talked to feels overworked and tired. They're worn thin. Morale is down. That's what month after month of overtime can do.

On Wednesday, Pat Camden, spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago, wasn't receptive to the mayor's policies during an interview with me and Lauren Cohn on WLS-AM 890.

"It would have been nice to hear the mayor saying, 'Where were the police? The police are out there doing their job, and if I had more police maybe we wouldn't have had so many shootings.' But that's not the way he operates," Camden said.

There's always money to be found when the politicians want to find it.

Some $50 million has been set aside for yet another monument to a Daley, a park named for the former mayor's late wife. And there's about $600 million or so for a lakefront project that includes a new athletic venue for DePaul University, although the Bulls and Blackhawks offered the use of the United Center rent-free.

And just before his last election, Gov. Pat Quinn found $54.5 million in state cash for a violence-reduction program now being investigated by the feds as a possible political slush fund.

There are not enough good-paying jobs on the predominantly African-American South and West sides. But there seems to be plenty of political cash to toss around.

Meanwhile, Democrats are encouraging waves of unskilled labor from south of the border to compete for what few low-skilled jobs still exist.

Families already savaged by decades of dependency on government programs continue to dissolve. Violence reigns. The giant street gangs have broken up into small and viperous neighborhood cliques.

Many children aren't allowed outside. I remember a detective telling me that for such children, it's like the "Hunger Games" out there.

But the political class in charge for decade after decade after decade — the Chicago Democrats — isn't ever held to account nationally.

When seen in the national news, they're about as green as forest ferns. Or they're all about soothing old political scars and healing divisions.

Or they're hip and they know Hollywood and can jump into icy lakes with late-night TV personalities.

All they have to do is rattle the keys, misdirect, smile and turn on the charm.

jskass@tribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

Why Congress Must Reopen the TWA 800 Investigation

By Jack Cashill

http://americanthinker.com/

July 7, 2014

The partially reconstructed fuselage of TWA Flight 800 is pulled out of a hangar in Calverton, New York, on September 14, 1999.

On July 2, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that it would not reopen the investigation into the destruction of TWA 800.  This was the Boeing 747 that was blown out of the sky ten miles south of the Long Island coast on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 people on board.

The TWA 800 Project, a team of former aviation investigators and scientists, had petitioned the NTSB to examine evidence that pointed toward a missile strike on the airline.  Not surprisingly, the NTSB, which had invested four years of resources to prove some other theory, any other theory, chose to stick to its original findings that flammable fuel/air vapors somehow caused the explosion.

Books have been written on this subject – I co-authored one of them with James Sanders, First Strike – so readers can access the body of evidence for a missile strike on their own.  An excellent point of entry is the documentary produced last year by the TWA 800 Project, simply called TWA Flight 800 and now available via streaming on Netflix.

One of the six whistleblowers profiled in that documentary deserves special attention.  His name is Hank Hughes.  At the time of the explosion, he was a senior accident investigator for the NTSB and was a member of the “Go-Team” that headed immediately to the crash site.

Hughes was responsible for determining whether or not any proposed scenario for the cause of the crash was consistent with the damage to the airplane interior.  So disturbed was Hughes by what he calls an “egregiously conducted investigation” that he attached a detailed affidavit to the TWA 800 Project’s petition to re-open the investigation.  What follows is a summary of that affidavit.

As Hughes points out, Title 49 of the U.S. Code gives the NTSB full authority to investigate all commercial airplane crashes.  That did not happen with TWA 800.  The FBI was “immediately and overwhelmingly present” at the site and quickly took control of the investigation.  Initially, the agency did so, says Hughes, “under the presumption that a criminal act had occurred.”  Even in these circumstances, however, the FBI had no lawful authority over the NTSB.  Indifferent to the law, the FBI seized control, and the NTSB leadership yielded without protest.

As it happened, the FBI agents had so little experience in aviation disasters that Hughes had to give them a tutorial on evidence handling.  By that time, however, much of the damage had already been done.  Unlike the NTSB, which records interviews, FBI agents simply take notes.  As a result, the interviews the agents conducted with the hundreds of eyewitnesses were “neither thorough nor reliable.”  That notwithstanding, the FBI would not allow the NTSB to talk to the witnesses for months, and only then under strained circumstances.

Despite its collective lack of know-how, the FBI also kept NTSB investigators away from various pieces of wreckage.  FBI agents made a practice, in fact, of screening physical evidence before NTSB investigators could see it and “withheld wreckage with suspicious damage patterns for unknown periods of time.”  In some instances, the FBI took evidence from the reconstruction hangar in Calverton, NY without allowing the NTSB to see it or analyze it.  “These prohibitions were tantamount to undermining a federal investigation,” says Hughes, “and violated NTSB standard operating procedures and regulations.”

FBI agents were not the only culprits.  Hughes openly accuses the NTSB’s Dr. David Mayer of changing location recovery tags on the wreckage.  By reclassifying where in the debris field an item was recovered, a dishonest investigator could create a crash scenario to fit a more politically acceptable outcome.

“I personally witnessed Dr. Mayer changing wreckage recovery tags on interior wreckage components without proper authority,” says Hughes.  “Mayer’s changes falsified the factual record of the actual physical locations from which those components were recovered.”  When Hughes challenged Mayer, Mayer told him, “I didn't want to confuse the Chairman.”  That chairman was Jim Hall, an experience-free political appointee.

TWA investigators had independently come to distrust Mayer and made their objections known as well.  It troubled them and Hughes that several NTSB officials signed off on Mayer’s report despite the accusations of tampering.  These officials solved the problem by having a Navy captain, who knew little about the database problems, testify at a December 1997 NTSB hearing instead of Mayer.  In this way, says Hughes, NTSB brass “curtailed all meaningful discussion of the database details while protecting Mayer from being held accountable, criticized and/or embarrassed.”

The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) also expressed concern about the efforts of Mayer and others to alter the database.  Its coordinator, Rocky Miller, was told ominously by a top NTSB official, “If you believe in corporate memory, you will keep your mouth shut.”  To its credit, the union did not shy from telling the truth in its final report: “A high pressure event breached the fuselage and the fuselage unzipped due to the event. The explosion [of the tank] was a result of this event.”

Contrary to NTSB regulations, Hughes, although a group chairman, was not allowed to write an analysis of what he found.  The evidence his group gathered led him to much the same conclusion as the IAMAW’s.  The pattern of seat damage and passenger injuries strongly suggested not a low-speed fuel tank explosion, as the NTSB would later insist, but “a high-order explosion from a military-type explosive detonating a significant distance away from the airframe.”  Says Hughes, “This was the first time in my 26 years as an NTSB accident investigator that I had been ordered not to write an analysis.”

Hughes was not the only high-level investigator whose analysis was suppressed.  As he notes, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Charles Wetli and the NTSB’s Aero-Medical Forensic Consultant, Col. Dennis Shanahan, M.D., were also told not to submit analyses of their findings.

The most spectacular bit of mischief involved the CIA.  The FBI had, for no good reason, commissioned the CIA to create an animation to prove that the 270 eyewitnesses who reported seeing something like a missile saw something other than a missile.  The CIA analysts concluded that what they saw was a noseless aircraft rocketing into space for another 3,500 or so feet before crashing into the sea.  This scenario, says Hughes unequivocally, “is physically impossible given what the FAA radar tracking data shows.”

According to Hughes, the CIA analysts knew this was impossible, but FBI honcho James Kallstrom went ahead and showed the animation at a wrap-up press conference to prove that there was “absolutely no evidence” that a criminal event destroyed the aircraft.

At both public NTSB hearings, the first in 1997 and the second in 2000, Kallstrom made sure there was no eyewitness testimony.  “The suppression of eyewitness accounts at an NTSB hearing was unprecedented,” says Hughes.  “This has never occurred before or since the NTSB investigation of TWA Flight 800.”  The aforementioned Dr. Mayer worked with the lead CIA analyst for sixteen months to align the witness accounts with the CIA’s impossible zoom-climb scenario.

There is much more, and I would invite those interested to read Hughes’s testimony in full.  “During the course of my 42-year career as an investigator,” Hughes concludes, “the investigation of TWA Flight 800 was the only case in which I witnessed deception, lies and corruption on the parts of investigators and their management. The extraordinary measures to which the NTSB, FBI and CIA went to falsify and distort witness statements or accounts of what occurred, to alter and hide physical evidence and to mount a false public relations campaign to misinform the public, was unconscionable.”

Given its need to protect the “corporate memory,” no one really expected the NTSB to open this potentially criminal can of worms on its own.  Now it is left to Congress, and if Congress does not act, no one will.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/07/why_congress_must_reopen_the_twa_800_investigation.html at July 08, 2014 - 06:22:55 AM CDT

Not on Obama’s Texas Itinerary: The Border

The president is behind on the immigration crisis, but so is Congress. 

By John Fund

http://www.nationalreview.com/

July 6, 2014

San Diego — President Obama will visit Texas this week for three political fundraisers. One place he will not visit while in Texas: the Mexican border. A border visit is apparently not necessary, in Obama’s view, to monitor the crisis that has seen thousands of migrants — including unaccompanied children — flood into the United States.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest bizarrely says that people criticizing Obama’s failure to visit the border would “rather play politics than actually try to address some of these challenges.” The president, it seems, will “lead from behind” once again. All this has been too much for Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents the border city of Laredo. “They should have seen this coming a long time ago . . . because we saw those numbers increasing,” he said today on CNN’s State of the Union. Cuellar admitted that our current system creates perverse incentives. “There is an incentive that if you bring your child over here, or you’re a child by yourself, you’re going to be let go. And that’s exactly what’s happening,” he said. “Our immigration courts are so backlogged. There’s not enough detention spaces. . . . This is the incentive we have to take away.” As for Obama’s pledge to send more personnel to the border, Cuellar didn’t sound confident: “I think he’s still one step behind. They knew this was happening a year ago. . . . and they are not reacting fast enough at this time.”

The crisis at the border should serve as a slap in the face to people in both parties who have been unable to come up with a border solution for the last decade. On the one hand, Democrats’ insistence that any reform must be “comprehensive” and include a path to citizenship ignores the fact that for most migrants, becoming a citizen is not a first-tier priority. The Pew Research Center found last year that of the 5.4 million Mexican immigrants who reside legally in the U.S. today, only 36 percent have chosen to become citizens. Safety, the ability to visit family and friends in Mexico and return, and being able to live openly in society are far more important to immigrants. For their part, many Republicans who insist on an enforcement-only approach ignore the evidence that the 45-year-old “War on Drugs” has done little to stem drug trafficking on the border despite an increase of more than 50 percent in Border Patrol funding over the last six years.

Border Patrol agents I spoke with were reluctant to be quoted on the record, but all agreed that a comprehensive solution that combines better border enforcement (which entails less-political enforcement) with a well-designed guest-worker program is necessary if we wish to make real progress. “We need to enforce employer sanctions at the same time we give employers a legal path to fill the jobs they must have workers for,” one agent told me. A retired agent points to thebracero (“one who works using his arms” in Spanish) guest-worker visa program, which until 1964 brought Mexican manual laborers north to work in agriculture, construction, and service industries.

The bracero program began during a labor shortage in World War II and expanded in response to an immigration crisis that peaked in 1954, when arrests of illegal aliens topped the 1 million mark. Under the bracero program, some 300,000 Mexican workers entered the U.S. legally every year. The results were dramatic. By 1959, arrests of illegal aliens had fallen to 45,000 a year; they remained under 100,000 annually until 1964.

There were human-rights abuses; perhaps the worst was that braceros saw 10 percent of their wages placed in accounts to be held for them by the Mexican government. An overwhelming majority of the workers never saw that money.

But the program’s ultimate sin was that it worked too well. It fell victim to opposition from labor-union leaders who viewed the braceros as competition for their members. Growers also spearheaded opposition to the program; they wanted to continue to hire illegal workers so that they could ignore the federally required minimum wage and working-condition requirements of the bracero program. “In 1953, the Eisenhower administration attempted to stop the illegal importation” of workers, writes historian Robert Caro in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate, but Johnson, who was then the Senate minority leader, was “on the growers’ side” and bitterly opposed the bracero program. A decade later, as president, Johnson struck the bracero program a fatal blow. A White House tape recording captures Johnson in 1964 telling one opponent of the bracero program that “these people are taking our jobs.” In December 1964, he issued an executive order killing the program. With its demise, the problem of illegal immigration returned. By 1976 apprehensions reached 876,000, and they mostly rose for decades until the Great Recession drove them back down. Even with the weak economy, they were still above 400,000 in 2013.

Border agents tell me they could most effectively do their job and contain the spreading corruption within their ranks if they didn’t have to chase down people coming here to work and could focus their resources instead on catching gang members and terrorists. In the wake of the “children’s crisis” on our border, it’s time to stake out a rational middle ground on immigration. “Congress could consider ideas for a practical temporary-worker program such as that being promoted by businesswoman Helen Krieble, called the Red Card Solution,” writes former GOP senator Jim DeMint, now president of the Heritage Foundation. Krieble, a Colorado rancher who calls the current system a disgrace to both Americans and foreigners,touts a 2012 poll showing that nearly three-quarters of voters agree that “it is not possible to have absolute border control without a better system for handling guest workers.”

Under one variation of Krieble’s plan, the U.S. government would conduct criminal background checks of applicants and contract with private employment agencies such as Kelly Services to establish offices in countries that today supply the most illegal labor. As Peter Roff of U.S. News & World Report explained it:

A high-tech system using the latest in biometrics [would] identify who comes in, where they go, and when they are supposed to leave. This would also solve the problems of how to create a guest-worker program that allows for circular migration that takes the change in seasons as well as the number of available jobs into account.

Representative Steve Pearce (R., N.M.) has a similar plan that would allow illegal immigrants to become citizens, but they would first have to return to their home country and wait in line there.

A lot of complications need to be worked out, but the Krieble approach recognizes the reality that border enforcement can work only if we accept the demands of our economy and provide a legal path for the workers many American employers rely on. It worked a half-century ago with the bracero program, when we had much less ability to monitor people and curb abuses. The crisis on the border should compel serious action instead of posturing. Those who continue to resist realistic reform are more than “one step behind.” They are creators of the crisis.

— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO and the co-author, with Hans von Spakovsky, of the recently released Obama’​s Enforcer: Eric Holder’​​s Justice Department.

Today's Laugh Track: Stephen Merchant Presents: "If We Won" with Newcastle Brown Ale

'None of our business’ is no answer to Islamist terror

Syria is now a bloodstained souk for terrorist tradecraft – a steady stream of young British Muslims head to the Levant to train as holy warriors

By Matthew d’Ancona

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

July 6, 2014

Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri has been pegged by Western intelligence as the most dangerous man in the world. Al-Asiri, particularly skilled at devising tiny bombs, has been behind all the recent attacks conducted by AQAP. 

Tomorrow marks the ninth anniversary of the 7/7 bombings in London, in which 52 civilians were killed and more than 700 injured. I vividly recall the first reports of a “power surge” on the Tube reaching The Sunday Telegraph newsroom – and then the sickening reality dawning upon us by stages that the capital, still celebrating the previous day’s news that it was to host the 2012 Olympics, had been struck by a serious atrocity.

Tony Blair did his best to continue hosting the G8 Summit at Gleneagles while leading the country in grief and resolve. Less than a month later, he declared: “Let no one be in doubt. The rules of the game have changed. If you come to this country from abroad, don’t meddle with extremism, because if you do, or get engaged with it, you are going to go back out again.”

Nine years on, David Cameron’s Government is still struggling with the implications of that statement, tangled in the poison ivy of the European Convention on Human Rights and the controversies spawned by every attempt to define “extremism”.

And – despite occasional assertions to the contrary – the terrorists have not retreated, or been vanquished. On the eve of a bleak anniversary for London, its airports – and other airports handling Atlantic flights – have imposed a security clampdown at the request of the US authorities. In this instance, the Department of Homeland Security is acting upon intelligence suggesting a link between foreign fighters in Syria and the group operating in the Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

Strategically, Islamic fundamentalism is awesomely adaptive, as resourceful in its use of digital propaganda – look at the flashy videos produced by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) – as it is geographically mobile. It is one thing to target a training camp. Quite another to tackle a downloadable ideology, available on any laptop or smartphone.

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The proximate cause of the present crackdown is a senior AQAP operative, Ibrahim al-Asiri, also known as Abu Saleh, a Saudi national and notoriously skilled bombmaker. Al-Asiri’s specialism is the construction of explosive devices using non-metallic components that evade airport detection machines. He was notoriously responsible for the underpants bomb worn by a young Nigerian man that failed to detonate on a Northwest airlines flight in 2009.

While Western wits sniggered at the idea of “boxer shorts that go bang”, al-Asiri pursued his researches relentlessly and is believed by several intelligence agencies to have made considerable technical progress. He exemplifies what John Reid, the former home secretary and one of the most intelligent occupants of that office, called the “fascist individual” – the new threat to our era, as Reid saw it, just as the fascist state imperilled the 20th century.

These antagonists work ceaselessly to exploit the structural frailties and loopholes of the Western system; to prove that their patience and ingenuity will always, sooner or later, defeat whatever measures we take to protect ourselves.

What is certain is that Syria is now the hub of global Islamist exchange – a bloodstained souk for terrorist tradecraft. Since the uprising against Assad began in 2011, there has been a steady stream of young British Muslims heading to the Levant to train as holy warriors and to undergo a rite of passage that will transform their status when they return to their radical groups in the UK.

Apart from anything else, it is easier to get into Syria than to make the long journey to Pakistan and thence to the Afghan borderlands – formerly, the principal home of these terrorist finishing schools. The aspirant British jihadi now sets off for Syria – often via Lebanon – to do what he sees as his Koranic duty.

He also makes contact with brother-fighters from all over the world. And it is this which troubles those engaged in counter-terrorism: the strengthening of a supply line between groups such as al-Asiri’s and smaller cells in this and other Western countries: a fizzing cable of human capital, knowledge and technical know-how.

These preparations for fresh terrorist attacks show how ridiculous is – and has always been – the claim that Islamist violence is a direct consequence of “Western foreign policy”. It is true enough that the fundamentalists object to “the Crusaders” and their military actions. But they also object to the West’s refusal to embrace sharia; to the fall of the caliphate; to the freedoms enjoyed by women and gay people in the West; to music (in the case of the Taliban); to Jews; to pluralism; to movies, television… and much, much else.

For Islamists, all war is “culture war”. To perceive their mission as simply a defensive response to military interventions is both historically illiterate and morally pusillanimous. Those who blamed the Iraq War for the 7/7 attacks missed the point spectacularly.

Indeed, if there is any connection between Western military action and the level of Islamist terror, it suggests, tentatively, a contrary trend. The 9/11 atrocities followed a period of relative inaction by the West, and certainly reflected al-Qaeda’s belief that the US was, in Osama bin Laden’s famous image, “a weak horse”.

One struggles to link al-Asiri’s apparent ambitions to a specific act by the West. Indeed, if anything, neo-conservatism and liberal interventionism are in general retreat. Barack Obama remains wedded to the principle that his presidency will be remembered for “ending wars, not starting them”.

The Commons vote against action in Syria last August was, in my view, a shameful moment. But it certainly chimed with a growing mood of isolationism and disengagement in this country and across Europe. Nigel Farage’s most reliable applause line was: “None of our business! None of our business!” Whether such rhetoric means very much in a globalised, interdependent world is open to question. But it certainly reflects the mood of the times. Ibrahim al-Asiri has no need to fear a fresh wave of “crusaders” marching towards him.

Even so: he still wants to kill us all. It has been bitterly ironic during the events to mark the centenary of the First World War to hear so many discussions about the errors made in the prelude to July 1914 and the failure during the conflict to understand its sheer novelty and the futility of applying old answers to new questions. In 2014, we are making mistakes that are grimly similar – refusing to acknowledge that this is a quite different form of battle, fought intermittently on many fronts, requiring stamina and patience of a sort that modern culture hardly encourages.

How much easier to dismiss the man in the hills of southern Yemen, laugh at the exploding underwear, and forget the whole thing. Meanwhile, like Conrad’s Professor in The Secret Agent, always armed with an explosive device “in a thick glass flask” to be detonated by an India rubber ball in his right hand, al-Asiri marches on: “He had no future. He disdained it. He was a force. His thoughts caressed the images of ruin and destruction.”

The Supreme Court reins in government bullies

By George F. Will

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

July 4, 2014

Two 5 to 4 decisions this week, on the final decision day of the Supreme Court’s term, dealt with issues that illustrate the legal consequences of political tactics by today’s progressives. One case demonstrated how progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, manufactures social strife and can do so in ways politically useful to progressives. The other case arose from government coercion used to conscript unwilling citizens into funding the progressives’ party.

Under the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), any government action that substantially burdens religious practices will be subject to strict judicial scrutiny to determine if it, rather than some less intrusive measure, is necessary to achieve a compelling government interest. The Affordable Care Act, as supplemented by regulations, requires for-profit employers to provide health-care coverage that includes all 20 Food and Drug Administration-approved birth control methods.

These include four that prevent a fertilized egg from being implanted in the uterus. Some persons consider this tantamount to abortion and oppose these abortifacients for religious reasons. Why did Congress, having enacted RFRA, write this clearly incompatible birth control mandate? Congress didn’t.

In the ACA, Congress simply required health plans to provide “preventive care” for women. An executive branch agency decided this meant the full menu of 20 technologies. So, during oral argument in March, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked: “What kind of constitutional structure do we have if the Congress can give an agency the power to grant or not grant a religious exemption based on what the agency determined?”

The answer is: The constitutional structure we have is the kind progressives prefer, wherein more and more decisions are made by unelected and unaccountable executive-branch “experts” exercising vast discretion. In this instance, the experts were, to say no more, willing to provoke a predictable controversy that would be convenient for the Democratic Party’s “war on women” trope. Today, this war consists of subsidizing only 16 of 20 birth control methods. The court has held that some “closely held” businesses — often family-owned and adhering to religious practices — have a right under RFRA to wage this war.

The court’s other end-of-term case arose from overreaching by government employees unions and their Democratic allies. At issue were the First Amendment rights of people herded into unions after being made into government employees by government’s semantic fiat.

In the 1950s, about 35 percent of the private-sector workforce was unionized; today just 6.7 percent is. The labor movement and the Democratic Party’s funding depend on government employees, 35.3 percent of whom are unionized. So, in Illinois, two Democratic governors manufactured government employees out of home health-care workers, a growing cohort — and a tempting target for dues-hungry unions — in a nation with an aging population and many infirm elderly.

In 2003, an executive order from Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, of fragrant memory, decreed that thousands of home health-care workers are government employees, which resulted in the Service Employees International Union being recognized as their representative. In 2009, anexecutive order from the current Democratic governor, Pat Quinn, designated even more home-care providers, who essentially are independent contractors, as government employees. The tenuous theory was that they are government workers because their pay comes indirectly from government — from the Medicaid funds received by the people who hire them.

Under a 1977 Supreme Court decision, which 26 states take advantage of, government employees can be forced to pay certain fees to unions even if the employees do not wish to be in the union and disagree with its positions. In last week’s case, the court carved out an exemption for people such as the home-care providers who are not “full-fledged” government employees.

This certainly seems sensible as applied to the lead plaintiff, a woman caring for her severely disabled son. Because the court has now recognized her First Amendment freedom of association — which includes the freedom not to associate — and freedom from compelled speech, she no longer will be required to pay fees to a union she refuses to join. SEIU will have to look elsewhere for the approximately $10 million in fees it has siphoned annually from people like her. This is real campaign finance reform.

Today’s court — nine fine minds producing written explanations of their reasoning about important principles — has its own discord. It is, nevertheless, a lagoon of logic in the forest primeval of today’s overheated politics and overbearing government. Twice this week the court played its indispensable role as constable, policing portions of this forest where progressivism has produced government guilty of gratuitous bullying.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Read more about this issue:

Charles Lane: The high court highlights the problem of the middleman

George Will: Illinois home-care workers should not be forced into unions

E.J. Dionne Jr.: The Supreme Court reveals its class bias

Ruth Marcus: Judging from experience

Kathleen Parker: Hobby Lobby case creates unexpected allies

How Not To Indict a Terrorist

The Justice Department’s charges against Khatallah are curiously sparse. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

July 5, 2014

Ahmed Abu Khatallah

What happens when the president who has politicized law-enforcement to a degree unprecedented in American history meets a terrorist responsible for killing Americans he has recklessly failed to protect, decimating his pretensions about “decimating” al-Qaeda?

What happens is: You get the most politicized terrorism indictment ever produced by the Justice Department. Behold United States v. Khatallah, Case No. 14 Crim. 141, quietly unsealed in a Washington courtroom last Saturday while the country dozed off into summer-vacation mode.

Ahmed Abu Khatallah, of course, is the only suspect apprehended in connection with the Benghazi massacre, a terrorist attack on a still-mysterious U.S. diplomatic installation. J. Christopher Stevens, the United States ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans — State Department official Sean Smith and two former Navy SEALs, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty — were killed. Until recently, such attacks have been known as acts of war carried out by the enemy. In the age of Obama, they are now known as “crimes” for which “defendants” like Khatallah are “brought to justice” — rather than brought to Gitmo. Meaning: They are whisked into our country when no one’s paying much attention. The red carpet is rolled out at a federal courthouse, where the “defendant” is given Miranda warnings, taxpayer-funded counsel, and all the rights of the American citizens they plot to kill, including lavish discovery-of-intelligence files relevant to their civilian trial.

Gold-plated due process for our enemies begins with the constitutional right to an indictment returned by a grand jury, providing the “defendant” with notice of the charges against him. In Khatallah’s case, the first thing you’ll notice is that the indictment is tiny: less than two pages long — 15 measly lines of text once you discount the caption, citations, and signature lines. This is a startling departure from Justice Department indictments in jihadist terror cases, a turn to brevity that cannot be explained solely by Obama’s banning of words like “jihadist” from the government lexicon.

In big criminal cases — and there are none bigger than those involving terrorist attacks — indictments tend toward book length, written in a narrative style designed to cut through the legalese and explain what happened. See, if the prosecutor is ethically convinced that there is sufficient evidence to convict an accused terrorist, his duty is to plead the case as expansively as necessary to get that evidence admitted.

In terrorism cases, that has always meant fully describing the nature of the terrorist enterprise. Look at the Justice Department’s jihadist cases from the Nineties (see e.g., here). They explain the history of the international jihadist network; the different terrorist organizations and state sponsors it encompasses; the identity, status, and roles of the players; plus all of the different plots and attacks that knit the network together.

The idea is to frame the case in a way that completely and coherently relates it — making it easier for judges to admit controversial evidence and jurors to grasp the willfulness of the accused. That is why the most critical decision made by the prosecutor drafting a terrorism indictment is Count One — i.e., the first statutory offense alleged.

Because jihadist terror is concerted activity involving many terrorists and organizations, the first count should always be an overarching conspiracy charge that sets the stage for a full exposition of what the defendants did and why they did it. In the Blind Sheikh indictment I wrote in 1993, Count One was a five-year, still ongoing “conspiracy to wage a war of urban terrorism against the United States” (charged under the Civil War–era seditious conspiracy statute in the federal code). In the indictment filed after al-Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Count One was a near decade-long, ongoing “conspiracy to kill United States nationals” (charged under a statute addressing “acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries” added to the code in the 1996 overhaul of anti-terrorism law). Such opening charges, framing the main themes of the prosecution, are generally prefaced by a descriptive introduction, unfolding the enterprise from its origins through its evolution in the months and years that followed — often right up to the date the indictment was filed.

Pleading the conspiracy this way enables prosecutors to prove “background evidence” — showing how the players came to know each other, and how those relationships logically evolved into a conspiratorial enterprise with a structure and hierarchy. Moreover, because the law presumes that a conspiracy continues indefinitely until its objectives are achieved, the prosecutor who alleges that the conspiracy has continued even after its latest terrorist atrocities maximizes the chances of having any newly discovered evidence ruled admissible. After all, if the principal conspiratorial agreement is to levy war on the United States or mass-murder American nationals, the conspiracy does not end just because a skyscraper or an embassy has been bombed. There are still members of the terrorist organization at large, they still seek to kill Americans, and their ongoing activities (e.g., bombings to retaliate for arrests) could help cinch the case.

Traditionally, the Justice Department handles things this way because the point of prosecuting the case is to obtain convictions on the most serious, readily provable charges that can be brought. A terrorist should be charged and convicted as a terrorist, not for some lesser offense. The more the evidence is allowed to sing for itself, the more the prosecutor is seen as revealing the truth rather than trying to shape or shade it. Jurors, using their common sense, gain confidence that the whole truth is being presented and that the accused truly are guilty of heinous crimes.

It seems, however, that the Khatallah prosecution is following a different strategy.

Khatallah has been identified by the State Department as a “senior leader” of Ansar al-Sharia, one of the al-Qaeda-tied franchises in Libya. Yet there is no mention of Ansar al-Sharia in the indictment, much less of al-Qaeda or the Islamic-supremacist ideology that ties jihadist affiliates together. In fact, the indictment does not even accuse Khatallah of being a terrorist.

This fact has been missed in the coverage. Most reporters are not lawyers. They see that the indictment does charge a conspiracy, and that this conspiracy does involve terrorism, so they understandably assume it must be a standard terrorism conspiracy indictment. But look more carefully. Khatallah is not charged with being a member of a terrorist conspiracy to kill Americans or attack American facilities. He is charged with the lesser offense of conspiring to provide material support to these terrorists – nameless and not further described.

In other words, the Justice Department is not alleging that Khatallah himself was a terrorist. It is saying that there were some elusive “terrorists” hanging around Benghazi, and Khatallah conspired to help the “terrorists” by contributing personnel — mainly, himself — to their machinations, knowing that these just might include preparation for a lethal attack on a U.S. facility.

Oh, and the duration of this conspiracy? It is alleged to have lasted about one day — i.e., from approximately sometime on September 11, 2012, to sometime after midnight September 12.

One day. In fact, maybe it was just a few hours.

Think about that. Radical Islam’s war against the United States has been underway for over 20 years. Eastern Libya has been an al-Qaeda hotbed for much of that time. That is why our government financially supported Muammar Qaddafi: His regime was providing intelligence on terror hubs like Benghazi and Derna, from which jihadists launched to fight American troops in Iraq. When President Obama turned on Qaddafi, terrorist organizations like Ansar al-Sharia were the beneficiaries. In the months before September 11, 2012, they repeatedly attacked Western targets in Eastern Libya — including one bombing attack on the U.S. diplomatic installation itself. Although this jihadist campaign induced other countries to pull their personnel out of the region, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not only left ours in, they reduced security.

Yet none of that finds its way into the indictment. Nothing about the background of anti-American jihad in Benghazi. Nothing about a previous attack on the U.S. diplomatic installation that jihadists themselves described as retaliation for the American killing of al-Qaeda’s leader in Libya, Abu Yahya al-Libi (Hassan Mohammed Qaed). Nothing about al-Qaeda’s emir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, publicly calling for Libyan jihadists to avenge al-Libi by “fighting and killing the crusaders” — after all, hadn’t Obama already “decimated” al-Qaeda? Nothing about the attacks against British diplomats and the Red Cross. Nothing about Khatallah’s position as an Ansar al-Sharia commander, nothing about the fact that he had been inveighingagainst the presence of an American facility in Benghazi in the days before September 11, and nothing about the Ansar al-Sharia forces marshaling outside the facility before the attack — armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, AK-47 rifles, and other weapons.

Nothing about a long-running, ongoing jihadist war against the United States.

Instead, the indictment is written to portray a sudden, spontaneous eruption of violence, without much planning or warning, in which Khatallah — who knows . . . perhaps inspired by a video — abruptly joined a disgruntled group of protesters that turned out to include some shady terrorists motivated by . . . well, who can really say? All we know is the violence started without warning and, before you could scramble a fighter-jet or fuel up Air Force One for a Vegas campaign junket, it was all over.

There are a lot of downsides to giving enemy-combatant terrorists all the majesty of American due process. But at least it used to mean that, by the end, you’d have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 

Now, it’s starting to look like what you get on the Sunday shows.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, was released by Encounter Books on June 3.