Immediately upon Boston bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev\u2019s capture, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham was demanding that the suspect\u2019s Miranda Rights be waived.\u00a0 The bomber, Graham contended, must be treated as an \u201cenemy combatant.\u201d He tweeted that the \u201cThe Law of War\u201d permits the United States government to withhold \u201cMiranda warnings\u201d and legal \u201ccounsel\u201d from those suspected of being \u201cpotential enemy combatant[s].\u201d<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, Graham\u2019s position is no anomaly.\u00a0 Within short order, many a Republican, both his Congressional colleagues as well as \u201cconservative\u201d media personalities, came to side with him.\u00a0 To be fair, their reasoning is understandable: If Tsarnaev is given Miranda Rights, he will then have the right to remain silent, and if he exercises this right, he will then refrain from revealing whatever he may know about future terrorist attacks, thus exposing innocent Americans to injury and death.<\/p>\n
Yet while \u201cthe Graham\u201d reasoning is understandable, it can\u2019t but send shivers down the spine of any liberty-loving American. The sort of utilitarian logic on which it\u2019s based is precisely what the Constitution was designed to guard against. <\/i>Unlike their posterity, those who ratified the Constitution knew that liberty is no mean feat.\u00a0 <\/i>In fact, it is beyond manly, approximating the divine, for means-end reasoning like that which Graham exemplifies is vastly more common, and vastly easier, than the resolutely non-utilitarian, and even anti-utilitarian, considerations that the love for liberty demands.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s be clear: though an immigrant, the Boston bomber is a naturalized American citizen. <\/i>Most Americans, yours truly included, believe that he is indeed guilty of the crime of which he\u2019s accused. But our beliefs on this score are utterly irrelevant: no one is guilty of any crime in America, regardless of how heinous it may be, until after <\/i>the government, upon meticulously subscribing to every detail of established procedure, proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.<\/p>\n
That every criminal defendant in America is presumed innocent before the government proves otherwise is elementary stuff. But, sadly, the Lindsay Grahams of the world remind us that this elementary stuff bears repeating.<\/p>\n
The liberty that Americans have always known is inseparable from the decentralization of authority and power that their institutional arrangements have traditionally secured.\u00a0 Multiple \u201cchecks and balances\u201d\u2014among which are the Constitution\u2019s Bill of Rights\u2014insure an essentially self-conflicted government, a government incapable of acting hastily and arbitrarily against both its own citizens as well as <\/i>those of other nations.<\/p>\n
In other words, there is no liberty; <\/i>there are only liberties.\u00a0 <\/i>Or, if you will, liberty refers to a system <\/i>of mutually reinforcing liberties, a system that distributes authority and power far and wide.<\/p>\n
Much has been done over America\u2019s history to erode this system of liberty.\u00a0 But there is no more ominous sign that it is all but a thing of the past than the government\u2019s targeting of American citizens, right here at home, as \u201cenemy combatants.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the case of Tsarnaev, the government, thankfully, decided to ignore the pleadings of Graham and many others and issue the suspect his Miranda Rights.\u00a0 Yet this does nothing to change the fact that legions of Americans cheered wildly last Friday night when he was arrested.\u00a0 Neither does it change the fact that the authorities, from the President on down, did much to encourage the notion that the guilty had been caught.<\/p>\n
As for this notion of an \u201cenemy combatant,\u201d it makes sense when a country is at war against an identifiable enemy.\u00a0 But if Tsarnaev is to be declared an enemy combatant, then with whom can he be said to be fighting against America?\u00a0 If we are at war, then the question is: with whom?<\/p>\n
Graham will no doubt answer \u201cradical Islam,\u201d or \u201cIslamism,\u201d or something along these lines.\u00a0 For a variety of reasons, this is woefully inadequate.<\/p>\n
As long as our government insists that it is engaged in some amorphous \u201cWar on Terror\u201d or \u201cWar on Islamo-Fascism,\u201d then, in principle, anyone, <\/i>and at any time and for any reason, can be declared an enemy combatant.\u00a0 Muslims will be particularly vulnerable.\u00a0 On Monday\u2019s edition of Sean Hannity\u2019s radio show, guest Jay Sekulow, from the American Center for Law and Justice, summarily dismissed this idea, reassuring listeners that anyone endowed with enemy combatant status has the right to attain a habeas corpus and argue his case before a judge so as to prove that he is not guilty as charged.<\/p>\n
Pay careful attention here.\u00a0 Sekulow thinks that American citizens needn\u2019t worry about their liberties because if they are accused of being enemy combatants, then the burden will be on them <\/i>to convince their government otherwise.<\/p>\n
All hyperbole aside, the Grahams and the Sekulows of the world pose a much larger threat to American liberty than any posed by the Tsarnaev brothers.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Immediately upon Boston bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev\u2019s capture, Republican Senator Lindsay Graham was demanding that the suspect\u2019s Miranda Rights be waived.\u00a0 The bomber, Graham contended, must be treated as an \u201cenemy combatant.\u201d He tweeted that the \u201cThe Law of War\u201d permits the United States government to withhold \u201cMiranda warnings\u201d and legal \u201ccounsel\u201d from those suspected of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n