06/15/07 – Warren Richey – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today, Warren Ritchie, returning, journalist from the Christian Science Monitor.
Talked to him a couple of weeks ago, you might remember about the Padilla trial, and he's written a couple of new ones about developments in the case of Ali Saleh Al-Mari, who's been sitting in the brig for four years.
Welcome back to the show, Warren.
Yeah, thank you very much.
Good to be with you.
Okay, now, hopefully, if we get time, I can ask you to update us a little bit on the case of Jose Padilla, but let's start with these, dare I say, explosive developments in the case of Mr. Al-Mari.
Do I have that right?
He's been sitting in a U.S. naval brig for four years?
Yes, he has.
Yeah, he's held as an enemy combatant.
He's not in the same place that Jose Padilla was held.
He is not, like Padilla, a U.S. citizen, but he was in the United States legally on a valid student visa, and so his legal status is significant for his legal status.
That he was arrested on American soil as opposed to captured in Afghanistan or something?
That's correct.
And, in fact, he wasn't just arrested in the United States, he was arrested in Peoria, right?
Well, yeah, Peoria is in the U.S.
I kind of think that matters a little bit as far as the narrative goes in the media, no offense, but the fact that this, oh, terrorists in Peoria, which is kind of the Norman Rockwell painting, right?
That's right.
The quintessential place, it's considered sort of the ultimate example of middle America.
Right.
Yeah, that's right.
There's some symbolism there, I suppose.
Sort of like in the Oklahoma City bombing, vulnerable in the heartland of America, where this kind of thing could never happen, and yet it did, that kind of thing gets a lot of play.
Well, yeah, I guess.
I guess.
All right, and now, really, the reason I wanted to harp on the Peoria thing just right there at the beginning is, especially as I'm reading your articles today, I've always wondered what was it that this Omar guy did anyway, and it says in your article that the accusations against him is that he was going to wage a cyber war against American financial markets?
That's the allegation.
I mean, pardon me if that sounds like it's not true, on its face.
Well, I don't know, it's very difficult to know, to gauge whether or not a particular individual would be capable of carrying something like that out, but that is the allegation that he was, and he did come to the United States to study at, I believe, Bradley University there in Illinois, computer science, and so he does have some skill with computers, but it's a little unclear how exactly he was going to wage an assault, a computer assault, on financial markets, but that is the allegation.
There are some other, the central allegation was that he was sent to the United States to be a kind of sleeper agent of Al Qaeda, and that he had had contacts with Al Qaeda members.
Those are difficult to assess as well, but the suggestion was that he was sent to the United States by senior members of Al Qaeda to engage in some kind of an attack at a later date.
Difficult to assess, is that because there's been no evidence put forward to sustain that?
Well, the administration has submitted affidavits saying that they have evidence of this, but it's not quite clear because he's not been put on trial, and he's not in a criminal setting, so there isn't the same kind of adversarial system or hearing to test the veracity of these allegations.
So the administration has put up evidence, it's just not clear how reliable the evidence is, so we're kind of left with that, but it has been enough to convince a magistrate and a judge that he should be held as an enemy combatant in military detention.
Now, of course, as you know, this week the Fourth Circuit Federal Appeals Court overturned that ruling and ordered his release because they said that the president had overstepped his authority in ordering him to be held by the military, as opposed to being charged by a crime or being held for some kind of immigration violation or something else.
Now, when the Military Commissions Act was passed last fall, didn't it say in it, by the way, federal courts, you're not allowed to hear cases deciding whether we have the power to do this kind of thing?
It did, and that's one of the really interesting aspects of this decision, because when lawyers for Al-Mari went to court and launched this constitutional challenge, they argued that the president was acting outside his authority and that if someone who is in the United States legally is to be detained, they must be detained under the same legal regime that normally is under, you'd need to go in front of a judge and they'd need to show some evidence and there'd be an opportunity to test it, as opposed to just declaring someone an enemy combatant and placing them into military custody.
When this suit came up to the appeals court level, an important thing had happened in the meantime, the Military Commissions Act was passed by Congress, and so the administration argued that the appeals court, even though the lower court had ruled on this and ruled in favor of detaining him militarily, the appeals court did not have jurisdiction to hear this case because of the Military Commissions Act, which had stripped it of jurisdiction.
So, this was a test, and it was not an insignificant test, because at the time that the Military Commissions Act was passed, the primary focus of the Military Commissions Act was the individuals being held at Guantanamo, and there were major, major court battles over to what extent individuals there should be allowed due process, access for due process to federal judges in the United States.
This is all over habeas corpus rights and what rights are due to those individuals.
The Military Commissions Act doesn't just say this only applies to people at Guantanamo, it also applies to any non-citizen who is designated as an enemy combatant, and so the question was, well, Al-Mari is a non-citizen, but he was arrested in the U.S., and he was legally present in the U.S., and in addition, he also has a family and wife, and was presumably legally in the United States to study.
The question is, well, what kind of rights should he have, and did the Military Commissions Act strip courts in the United States of the ability to hear a case by someone who is in the United States legally, and has some kind of legitimate tie to the United States?
Last court said that the Military Commissions Act does not apply to a person in Al-Mari's position.
Okay, now, so what that means, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if you're a lawyer in a past life or anything like that, I don't have any legal training, but I really want to understand this.
My basic understanding, I guess, is that when the Military Commissions Act says to a federal court that you may not review the standing of this law, etc., like that, that the only excuse that they have, the only way that they can ignore that, basically, and rule against it anyway, is if they're not quibbling over the statute, but over the Constitution.
And when they say that the Constitutional law is being violated by this statute, then they can basically ignore Congress's mandate that they not take these cases and decide something like this.
Is that basically right?
Well, first, I'm not a lawyer, I'm just a reporter.
But I write about the law quite a bit.
But that's not exactly how I understand it.
The way I think about this decision that came down, there are three big issues.
Two of them deal with constitutional rights, due process rights.
That's sort of the merit side of the decision.
But the first question that the Court has to address is whether it has jurisdiction to hear the case.
And that's what I was talking about earlier.
The Military Commissions Act essentially says that courts don't have jurisdiction to hear habeas cases or other challenges to detention by non-citizens who are being detained as enemy combatants.
That primarily means people in Guantanamo, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it couldn't have been somebody who was not a citizen who's detained in the United States.
And so there was great concern, and still is, that the Military Commissions Act could apply to any non-citizen deemed an enemy combatant and essentially held by the military.
But haven't they argued in the past that it was okay that they were doing what they were doing because Guantanamo was not the United States?
Yes, and these are individuals who have never come to the United States, who have never come onto American soil, because there's a difference between the rights that you are due when you're in the United States versus someone who's overseas.
And the administration has paid close attention to this.
And in a series of rulings in recent years, the Supreme Court has kind of cut back on that.
And you may recall, there was a ruling several years ago in a case called Rasool that said that the prisoners at Guantanamo may be due some right to appeal to federal courts.
But interestingly, those rights are statutory rights, and I'm probably getting too deep into this.
But there's a difference between a statutory right, a right that comes from a law written by Congress, versus a constitutional right.
Yeah, see, that's what I was trying to get at, too.
Yeah.
And so the constitutional right—and this is a somewhat murky area right now, because there are arguments that what was done in the Military Commissions Act was a kind of suspension of the constitutional right of habeas corpus.
And so if Congress, through the Military Commissions Act, has suspended habeas corpus without the conditions that are laid out in the Constitution, that there be an emergency situation that requires it— An invasion or rebellion, the Constitution says.
That's right.
Yeah.
Then that's unconstitutional, and they can't do it.
But the administration perspective on that is that these are statutory rights that are implicated at Guantanamo, and that the Military Commissions Act relates to those statutory rights, not to the constitutional right to habeas.
Now when you're in the United States, there is a constitutional right to habeas, particularly if you're a legal resident.
And so the Fourth Circuit said that if the Military Commissions Act applied and stripped the courts of jurisdiction in the Al-Marri case, that would amount to a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and that would be a violation of the Constitution.
So it essentially said that they did have jurisdiction, and that part of the decision significantly was three to nothing.
It was unanimous.
Didn't you quote the opinion as going back to the Civil War and saying, the President just does not have the authority to use the military against Americans unless there is a declared state of martial law or declared by Congress suspension of the writ of habeas corpus?
Yes, the majority in the Fourth Circuit case went back to the Milligan case that is a significant landmark.
And essentially that case says that if the courts are open and functioning, then the military doesn't have jurisdiction to take control or seize civilians, that civilians, if they are to be held, they must be held in the civilian process.
This is the essence of the debate going on in the country now.
It's whether or not this war on terror is substantially different than anything we've faced in the past, and thus we need a new legal paradigm to deal with it.
That legal paradigm recognizes that there are no defined battlefield when you're fighting an enemy that is prepared to load up the trunk of a car with explosives and drive it into a place where there are a lot of innocent people.
And that's what the government has argued, right, in court, that the whole world is the battlefield, including the United States.
And now you're saying that the court said, uh-uh.
That's right, that's right.
The court here said that isn't the correct interpretation, that if you want to hold someone as you're holding El-Mari, you have to charge him with a crime.
And if you don't charge him with a crime, then you have to do something else.
Now, a lot of the commentary about this decision has presented it as an either-or situation where you either charge him with a crime or you let him go.
Well, that's not true.
There are a lot of things the government could do, frankly, to hold someone if they really thought they were dangerous.
They could use a material witness warrant, for example, which was used widely in the weeks and months after the 9-11 attack for this broad dragnet that was conducted throughout the country.
Anyone who was suspected of any kind of connection to al-Qaeda was brought in and interrogated.
Thousands of people, right?
That's correct.
Yeah.
And that was all done using a material witness warrant.
That's funny, isn't it?
That one's really gone down the memory hole.
I think most people just don't remember that, that it's been burned away.
And there are other things that can be done.
They could move El-Mari to Guantanamo, for example.
It was raised...
Didn't a judge or didn't a group of judges down in Guantanamo just declare that they didn't have jurisdiction over these guys anymore because of whether the combatants were lawful or unlawful?
Well, stay tuned on that.
The government is appealing.
That decision is interesting in that, in watching this process for over the years, there's never really been a question about people who are held at Guantanamo.
They've been referred to as enemy combatants, but the defense department's view of those individuals were that they were unlawful enemy combatants all the time.
In other words, they've used the term enemy combatant as a kind of shorthand, but what they meant was unlawful enemy combatants.
Wait, I thought that unlawful enemy combatant was all defined in the Geneva Conventions and all that.
What they did instead was make up this brand new thing out of whole cloth, the enemy combatant that existed nowhere in the law, so that they didn't have to obey all the statutes that enforced the Geneva Conventions.
Well, they were trying to avoid Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions, and essentially what they said was that these people are as unlawful combatants.
They're not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
This is the tricky thing.
If the administration believed that some of the individuals at Guantanamo were lawful enemy combatants, then by holding them at Guantanamo, they are clearly in violation of Geneva.
A lawful enemy combatant must be treated as a POW, and they can't do a lot of the things that are happening at Guantanamo.
They just can't do that.
If there was someone that the military thought was a lawful enemy combatant, that individual would have to be treated in a different way and have to be in a different location.
I hesitate to predict what happens, but I suspect the administration might win its appeal.
They've asked both judges to reconsider, and in their motions to reconsider, they've essentially said that the enemy combatant designations by the combat status review tribunals amount to a finding that they are unlawful enemy combatants, which is pretty much what I just said.
But we'll see.
Maybe the judges disagree, and then the administration would have to appeal it to a two or three judge panel.
Well, it's hard for me to believe that all this making it up as they go along could possibly be ultimately legal and constitutional.
We're so far beyond constitutional here.
We're talking details within unconstitutional behavior, right?
Well, what's happened?
Yes, they are.
I mean, I have the Bill of Rights here, and the Bill of Rights doesn't say citizen anywhere.
It says people, persons, et cetera, as vague as possible, deliberately.
You can't go around doing this to people, is what it says, basically.
Well, there are several different places where they talk about the people, and there are places where it designates—well, anyway.
What?
It doesn't say Americans or citizens or anything.
The implication is anyone under the jurisdiction of the national government of the United States.
I mean, Congress does have the power to make rules concerning the laws of war and dealing with foreigners and foreign states and that kind of thing.
I'm not saying that.
But anyone under their jurisdiction here, anyone under the power of the federal police here is supposed to be bound by the Bill of Rights, unlike this guy, Al-Mari, who was thrown in a dungeon, or Padilla.
Yes.
Well, the administration's position is that under emergency circumstances, the executive has the power to take action to protect the country, and they cite cases that support that proposition.
I mean, this isn't resolved yet, and it's a difficult area because the stakes are so high for the country.
For example, this Fourth Circuit decision will be appealed, and the Fourth Circuit—it's not clear how the Fourth Circuit will rule on this.
It's a closed case because the judges are—at least analysts believe the judges will be pretty sharply divided, and so one or two judges may swing this one way or the other.
And then after that, it's unclear what happens at the United States Supreme Court, if it should go there and if the Supreme Court should agree to hear it.
It's just not clear how these cases will be resolved and whether or not the court will recognize this kind of power for the president.
Well, it has been a kind of a rollercoaster ride, actually, over the last few years watching these different court cases, and trying to really make sense, trying to find a pattern.
I'm no mathematician.
Maybe if I had a bit higher IQ, I could see the pattern in here somewhere, but from where I sit, it seems completely random whether somebody's going to get thrown in Guantanamo or whether they're going to be imprisoned in Eastern Europe at former Soviet gulags, or whether they'll be given a trial like Moussaoui and John Walker Lind, or maybe held by the Navy and tortured for a while and then given a trial like Jose Padilla.
Is there a pattern to any of this?
Well, I think part of it is where you are arrested, where you're seized.
If you're seized overseas, then you're going to be dealt with overseas.
If you're arrested in the U.S. like Moussaoui was, and brought into the criminal justice system, then that's where you're...
No, because that's what happened to Padilla.
They turned him over to the Navy, and then you had Yasser Hamdi, who was arrested on the same battlefield with John Walker Lind.
They held him as an enemy combatant for a while, then they let him go.
Well, what happened with Hamdi is they discovered while he was at Gitmo that he was born in the United States.
He was a citizen, and so here's an example of the benefit of citizenship.
Instead of being at Gitmo, he is then brought to the United States and held at the brig.
That did trigger all kinds of judicial review that hasn't been accorded to the prisoners at Guantanamo, and at the end of that review, I think it is telling that at the end of that review when he essentially won his case, rather than getting his hearing that he was fighting for, he was allowed to return to Saudi Arabia, and so there never was a hearing.
There's a lot of that.
How many people have been released from Guantanamo Bay over the years, just sent back, basically?
Oh, I don't know the number, but it's probably, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred.
Right.
Yeah, I was thinking two or three hundred.
But there's a danger in seeing that and saying, well, those were individuals who were all innocent.
Really?
Yeah, there is actually.
Now I think it's clear that some people who have been detained and some who are still there are most likely innocent, were picked up under wrong, under false evidence, or however.
Sold by the Pakistanis or the Northern Alliance.
That's right.
There's a bounty system, and if you brought in somebody who was al-Qaeda, you got paid a certain amount.
So you can see how in the aftermath, with U.S. military operations underway, you put out words that will pay you X number of dollars if you can bring us somebody from al-Qaeda.
You can imagine what would happen, because whatever it was, it was a lot of money.
And so it was incumbent on the United States to be extraordinarily careful.
And we were told that the individuals who would make it to Guantanamo would be the worst of the worst.
Now that doesn't seem to have been the case, but that doesn't mean that some of them aren't.
Oh, right.
Now, I wasn't trying to argue that, that everyone there is innocent.
I guess I thought you were referring to the ones who were let free.
Let me talk about not being proven beyond a shadow of doubt and presumption of innocence.
I've got to presume anybody that they let go after a few years of telling us that they're the worst of the worst, must have been innocent all along, or else why would they have let them go?
Well, that's an interesting question, but from looking at the process, they don't actually declare that the individuals are safe to go, and many of them are still locked up.
They're just locked up in their home country.
When they're sent back, some of them do go free, but many of them go right into a cell in their home country.
Which actually, don't say that too loudly, because you could just reveal a real simple solution to this problem.
Well, military officials have said this, that if they could find places for a lot of these individuals, they would, and then they could eliminate the need for Guantanamo.
Well the Egyptians and the Syrians and others have already been torturing people for us, the renditioning and all that.
Send them there.
There are any number of American client states overseas that aren't run by any system of law whatsoever.
The United States has laws that prevent that kind of thing.
I'm looking for the law which prevents them from doing anything.
I admit I am very impressed to see courts here and there stepping up and limiting this power.
Last summer, the Supreme Court ruled that Bush had been violating the law all along.
And that common article 3 says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity.
It's very vague.
And so, that was basically the argument of the Bush administration.
The Geneva Convention was too vague.
No degrading behavior of any kind, can it be more specific?
And so they were breaking the law all along.
I don't know how many different charges of kidnapping and torture and murder you would put on them, but basically the Supreme Court said that this entire system, as it existed from the beginning of the war against Afghanistan up until that point, was completely without legal basis whatsoever.
And that Bush could not continue to do any of this unless Congress passed a law making it legal, which they immediately did.
Yeah, and that's one of the reasons this designation of enemy combatant versus illegal enemy combatant, or unlawful enemy combatant, is so important.
Because if these individuals, or any of these individuals, are not unlawful enemy combatants, then they're acting in clear violation of the Geneva Accords.
And so, we shall see.
Let me ask you this, in the last few minutes here, can you give us an update on the case of Jose Pidez?
Has there been any interesting developments at his trial lately?
Well my understanding now, I'm going to have to sort of full disclosure, I'm in Washington D.C. working on other things, but I'm keeping an eye on the trial.
At this point, the government has completed its direct examination of the FBI case agent, which means that they have played for the jury many of the tapes, the intercepted conversations of the defendants, Adam Hasun, JOC, and Padilla.
And now the defense is beginning cross-examination, which should be interesting, because one of the things that's interesting about the tapes is that they seem to show a kind of loose code that was used by individuals talking on the phone.
And the FBI agent says, well, when they're talking about soccer, they're really talking about jihad and fighting, and when they're talking about sports equipment, they're really talking about weaponry.
I haven't seen it yet, but there's one particular reference to sending zucchini to Lebanon, and it's a large amount of money to buy zucchini, so we'll see what that means, but the defense has said that the FBI is putting a spin on this.
Is there any way for them to prove, or have they really attempted to prove that zucchini means this, or just that obviously they weren't talking about zucchini and just trying to say, make up your own conclusion, or what?
Yeah, well, we'll see.
So far, they haven't.
So far, I haven't seen it, but the jury is sitting there listening to this, and so the jury is going to use its common sense, so even if the government doesn't bring something in and say, okay, well, here's what they were talking about, I mean, as an observer of the trial, I'd like to see that, because I'd like to know, and from the defense, I'd like to know what it is that they were talking about, if there's an innocent explanation.
Or even a less guilty explanation, such as they were just scoring some hash from Lebanon, or any number of who knows what, maybe it really was soccer balls, or I don't know.
I think people talk in kind of phony code about things all the time on the phone, and if you're an FBI agent, you can have a lot of fun imagining what they must have really meant by that, and see how it all fits together, and you know how FBI agents are, they're kind of conspiracy theorists, they start with their conclusion and then they work backwards to try to make it look like they're right.
Well, yes, that's true, and of course, that's their job, they're there to make cases.
But there is an aspect of, you know, in the Middle East, and I don't know how much you've traveled in the Middle East, but governments in the Middle East aren't as free as we Americans might be accustomed to.
But people who live in the Middle East know that it's not uncommon that the government is listening and or watching, and so there is a kind of code or reluctance to speak that could be related to that, as opposed to a concern about people listening on this side.
But there is some indication in these conversations that the individuals were concerned about American agents listening in as well, so it's going to be, you know, it's not a clear picture at all.
Well, you know, it's obvious that I have a bias of, you know, the most presumption of innocence that I can conjure up in my mind for these three, because the whole case against Jose Padilla before this was complete bull.
And then, as you explained to us last time, these other two guys, the feds have been watching them for 15 years, and only now they've decided to prosecute them.
Paul Wolfowitz said that Padilla wasn't guilty of anything other than some fairly loose talk, which means to me that this whole thing is a sham, and besides that, even if he's guilty, the fact that the U.S. government tortured him in his Navy dungeon means to me that he gets set free anyway.
So that's, you know, that's my bias against this.
I give these guys the biggest presumption of innocence that I can possibly conjure up, and I very well may be wrong about that.
It very well could be that these guys really are guilty of, you know, trying to arrange some money for some Chechen fighters or whatever it is they're accused of, but it just seems to me like, well, it's, you know, it's sort of like the Al-Marri case, right?
This was kind of a big deal, sort of like the JFK plot and the Fort Dix plot before that.
Real big deal on TV for a little while, but then you don't hear anything about it anymore.
Now we have a little bit of hindsight.
We look back at Al-Marri and we say, wait a minute, this guy is sitting in a library at the community college working on his PC, and all of a sudden he's a terrorist mastermind going to wage war against all the banks on Wall Street and destroy America's financial networks, etc., and whisk him off to a dungeon.
And we look, to me, I look back on that now, and I hear that, and it just sounds like the most implausible, I don't even think they'd use that on 24 as an excuse to torture somebody.
I mean, come on.
You know, I don't want to defend anybody or anything, but in this climate, with the possibility of a substantial bomb or a weapon of mass destruction, it's dangerous not to pay close attention to each individual.
But having said that, it strikes me that it's dangerous to also be so consumed with this quest for security that you sort of treat people as if they're guilty.
I mean, you said earlier a presumption of innocence.
In the United States, we're entitled to a presumption of innocence, and that should be the starting point.
Instead, I have to admit that that's my bias, right?
Well, again, that's not a bias, that's the requirement.
That's our society, that's what we're about.
And Mr. Al-Marri doesn't seem to have had much of a presumption of innocence, nor Padilla.
When the Padilla trial started, the jurors had to be asked whether they'd ever heard the term dirty bomb.
And now how do you un-ring that bell?
Right.
Yeah, how prejudicial is just that question in the screening?
So, you know, I don't know what to say, but I think it's important to keep a close eye on these developments, and I think we're at a very important point as a country.
The other thing to remember is, these issues are being worked out.
When the appeals court ruled earlier this week, I mean, that's our system, that's the way it works.
It would be appealed to a higher court, and that higher court is going to take a good, close look at this.
They are going to do their best to decide what's the correct way to resolve it.
And so our system is working.
And it's frustrating because it doesn't work as quickly as maybe we'd like, but it is working.
Well, it's true.
I mean, I have to give James Madison credit myself.
I remember a clip out of that movie Amistad about the slave ship a long time ago, remember that?
Sure, sure.
And there's a scene where the Spanish ambassador says to the president, well, why don't you just call the judge and tell him to rule the way you want?
And the president says, I'm sorry, I really don't have any jurisdiction over the judges other than, you know, I gave him his job and hopefully he'll rule the way I want because I hired him.
But other than that, I can't tell him how to decide.
And the Spanish ambassador says, well, how the hell do you effectively rule this country if you can't just call the judges and tell them what to rule?
And you know, of course, the concern is now that the president basically is taking the position.
In the movie, John Quincy Adams says, well, you know, we decided that liberty is more important than effective rule.
And yet here, George Bush has taken the position of the Spanish ambassador to the United States back then, which is, screw the courts.
I want to do this my way.
And I guess I believe it's only because his approval rating is so low that he didn't just pull on Andrew Jackson until the Supreme Court to go screw themselves last summer.
You know, why not?
You made the law.
Now let's see you enforce it.
All right.
That's what I thought.
That's been the attitude of the Bush administration this whole time.
And, and of course, all this stuff is precedent setting of President Giuliani is going to have all these laws that have been passed under Bush, only he'll have a fresh start.
You know, well, I, I have to point out, you know, these issues, these are, these are fairly close issues.
When the Supreme Court ruled, you know, it rules five for these are all close issues.
So if one justice goes one way, then it goes the other way.
So when the when the administration loses a close case, it loses a close case.
These aren't 9-0 decisions.
Right.
These are difficult, really difficult constitutional issues.
This is in what we've seen over the past since, since 9-11 is really a kind of reexamination of some of the fundamental values of the country.
I mean, really, you when you when you look at some of the decisions and, and what the justices and judges are considering these are, this is bedrock stuff.
You mentioned Madison.
I mean, it does, it goes back to Madison, it goes back to what the country was, what the founders of the country intended in terms of liberty, and not and not just liberty, liberty wasn't the only that, you know, the, the, they were also concerned with having a country that would be robust enough to sustain threats from abroad.
And as you know, from early history of the other country, we had major threats from abroad.
Yeah, the British invaded us twice.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think you're absolutely right about that.
I wish I think more and more people are understanding and I wish more and more would to that it can happen here.
And this is the kind of thing where once you've given up your Bill of Rights, I mean, let's face it, the rule of men in this country, as it were, is doing everything it can to centralize power in the national government and in the presidency.
And the only thing restraining them right now are Article Three judges enforcing the Bill of Rights and the restrictions in Article One, Section Nine.
That's it.
The Constitution is the last barrier we have left to despotism in this country.
Yes, but I would put it I would turn it around the other way.
Everything that happens in this country happens because of the Constitution.
It's our foundation.
Right.
So you have Article Two in the first place, right?
That's right.
And so if the government goes off course, we have it there to pull it back.
And that's the key.
It's there.
It's the foundation.
And so it's not like it's going to go away.
It's there.
And you know, I think we just have to be confident that, you know, that the people in a position to enforce these protections enforce them.
If I could just keep it one more minute, I want to get your comment on this.
One of my big fears when I look at the Padilla case in Almarri and you know, you can go through the whole list from Lodi, California to Detroit and the Lackawanna six and the Miami plot against the Sears Tower and the rest of these.
It seems to me like the FBI is spending all their time making up nonsense cases to prosecute instead of doing their actual job, which is preventing the next actual spectacular attack planned by the people who actually plan to carry one out.
Well, it's you know, if you look, I mean, I can understand how you could you could come to that conclusion.
But in fact, I mean, that's kind of how September 11th happened, right, is they were sitting there jerking around doing everything but looking at Arabs in flight schools and the things that mattered.
Yes, but, but these but the efforts of the government have disrupted some plot.
And if you if you want to criticize the government, you can criticize the government for being too aggressive.
But what what a lot of this is oriented toward is putting individuals who might be inclined to assist Al Qaeda on notice.
And and I mean that in a broad way.
Anybody who was inclined to contribute to a Muslim charity, even a legitimate Muslim charity, will not do so now because of the threat that they will that they will use, they'll get the knock at the door and be hauled off to jail.
Well, see, I guess that's a really good point.
It seems to me that if you look at the Miami case or the the the Fort Dix six and all this stuff, if the FBI had just come to them and said, hey, pal, we're watching you, so don't get any smart ideas rather than going to the lengths of hiring an informant and entrapping these people into these gigantic nonsense plots, if they would just put the people on notice that they're being watched and leave it at that and meanwhile keep out keep a lookout for real threats.
I mean, there's a lot of entrapment going on and you're right that they're being too aggressive or if that's a criticism, that is one, I guess, is what you said.
But I'm saying they're not being aggressive towards, as far as I can tell, any actual threats since September 11th.
It's all been, you know, the retarded kid down at the local Islamic bookstore that they entrap into saying something stupid into an open microphone like the New York case where he was going to set off a bomb at the subway station where it's like, come on, this kid didn't do anything.
Well, there are cases, well, in effect, the country has been put on notice.
Anybody who's paying attention knows that there is a massive eavesdropping operation underway and so anybody who comes here or is here and wants to engage in this kind of activity is pretty much on notice that they're going to be watched and should be.
If somebody comes here and wants to engage in illegal conduct and terrorism, then no, we better hope that the people who are sworn to protect us do so.
The question is, are they doing so in a manner that complies with the other half of our constitutional protection?
Well, I'm definitely reassured in the case that somehow my computer crashes and I lose this file that I can call the NSA and get a backup recording of it.
I appreciate your time very much, everybody.
Warren Ritchie is a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor.
Thanks, Warren.
Thank you very much.