Are the Al Qaeda 7 Just John Adams Wannabe's

In the Atlantic today I found a rather slanted article titled Not Believing in America "Liz Cheney and company tear at the legal system that makes this country free and exceptional by targeting the rights of the accused and their attorneys"

It's about time we let the left professorial elite know that trying to fit a round peg in a square hole to call it a 'fitting historical example' just isn't cutting it with us any more. We know the truth and we will report the truth. I couldn't take it anymore. I wrote the author the following:

Dear Mr. Edwards,

While I agree with the majority of your article and we are of the same generation, I am just not sure I get your point on the “Al Qaeda 7”.

To the overall patriotism of your article, I couldn’t agree more. I am astounded when I hear a 20-something say what a horrible country we are and verbally ponder why anyone would ever want to emigrate here. I wonder what KoolAid their professors are feeding them to cause them to think this way, as we are still the most forgiving and free nation on the face of the earth. The United States of America as a whole with her people and her history is exceptional without a doubt. Aside from the fact that I am watching our government trying to run our “exceptionalism” into the ground and I see them working hard to make us “just another European Nation” with every bit of power they have in their arsenal, while engaging in interference with other nations (such as Honduras and others) where we have no business, we are not yet without exceptionalism.

But to your argument concerning the “Al Qaeda 7”, I am not seeing it the way you do. What exactly is your point about Cheney and Kristol? I think in this case they are correct in what they are saying.

Yes, John Adams defended the British soldiers. What you aren’t remembering is that those soldiers of the Boston Massacre were tried prior to the revolution. They were here by order of the crown, acting as the “policemen”, or if you will, the “tax-enforcers” in the colonies. We were still British Subjects in the eyes of the crown, and they were sent here to quell the growing anger of “taxation without representation”.

The Boston Massacre occurred in 1770, prior to any physical separation between the British government and the colonies, during a time of great unrest. We may have been rebelling, may have declared our intention to separate, but we had not yet won separation. Adams, perhaps to the consternation of many sympathizers, stated he felt it was his duty to defend them, to show our colonies as fair in our justice to the crown.

Your argument is more equal to a modern day analogy of an attorney choosing to defend a National Guardsmen after a riot which had gone so badly that in self defense, he felt rightly or wrongly compelled to kill many rioters. The guardsman would require defense because he fired the first shots killing rioters who he felt threatened him. He has the ability and the right to defend himself with the specific defense that he was threatened in some physical way, and he was acting in defense of his own life or those of his fellow guardsmen. He and the rioters are all citizens of the same nation. There was civil unrest. There was a physical assault. There was an even greater threat by those behind the original attacker and the escalation became a tragedy. He would deserve a defense, although the wounded parties or their sympathizers may not agree and it may be an unpopular defense to them. That was what Adams did.

That’s a bit of a different scenario than Panti-bombers and other war criminals who come here to blow up airplanes full of travelers above cities, or to fly those planes directly into people’s work places, don’t you think?

In this case, it is not our own countrymen we are fighting (unless in a few cases they became citizens prior to deciding to blow us up). We are not subjects of those suicide bombers who believe themselves to be “soldiers”. We are not a nation attempting to reason or to separate from the motherland through which they hail. Moreover, we are currently at war with their countries or at the very least their religious misconceptions which cause them to become fighters for those countries for the sake of jihad. They were not threatened by a mob of people rioting against them. They boarded planes with the strict intent to kill all aboard for reasons of hateful intentions to prove a point without regard to those “unbelievers”.

You are comparing apples and oranges with your argument.

Another key point about Adams is that he didn’t enter the federal government for another 19 years after trying those soldiers, nor did he take any position within the government that had anything to do with continuing to defend the similarly accused leading up to, during, or after the war. These attorney’s came straight from those unfinished cases to Justice. That’s a huge difference.

Overall, this whole war is a deeply complex and difficult issue. That and our agreements or differences as to why we are in it aside, we are in a war. That makes the cards in your argument play quite differently. On the one hand you have the inequality of the comparisons, on the other, the average American’s mindset on the whole deal. I am not talking Harvard or Princeton’s intellectually elite mindset; I am talking the average American’s mindset.

The American public is typically of the “You want to fight us? Bring it on” mindset when somebody brings acts of war to our shores. Blowing up planeloads of regular folks is an act of war. Our intent is to make war fair and square, military to military and we will fight it. There are accepted Rules of Engagement. Don’t be setting off bombs in your panties on a Christmas Day flight full of regular families who are just going to observe their familial traditions, and certainly don’t take plane loads of workers, children and women hostage and fly them into tall buildings on a bright blue day, and expect us to feel sorry for you if you get caught before you succeed in blowing us all up. You deserve trial, but in a military tribunal if you are caught. If you are guilty, then you deserve to be incarcerated for life in a military prison or sentenced to death.

American citizens culturally loathe unfair fights, especially when it involves killing innocent citizens in acts of mass murder, whether or not you take yourself with you, rather than engaging our trained and paid military. We have words and phrases for acts like that, one of which is baby killers. Just like our decades of fighting the similar war of Barbary Bay where they would take hostage our shipments overseas or our transits, holding innocent Americans hostage for ransom, we cannot continue to pay bribes, do business with, or to use these murderous fanatics with the one hand and fight them with the other. Thomas Jefferson had it right – cut them off financially, realize our mistakes, don’t repeat those mistakes, fight to win the war fair and square – battle by battle – and get back to the business of America. On the Shores of Tripoli and all that.

In reality, what you are saying is nothing new under the sun. Every young attorney truly covets a high profile cases such as these. It makes those 100 hour weeks go by quickly. It assures them stature in all the right places to further their careers and make the big bucks, just like the shining stars they believe themselves to be. It catapults them into partner like nothing else. It garners those awards, promotions, the visibility, and accolades at every turn. But it should not catapult them into a governmental position so powerful as to ensure justice for Americans against the very ones they just finished defending or were hired away from defending!

It is a conflict of interest to come off a defense team and turn around to take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States while agreeing to serve as US prosecutors to those very cases of which you are intimately familiar. The Al Qaeda 7 attorney’s obviously have a soft spot for these prisoners (or a keen eye for the fast track) or they wouldn’t have agreed to defend them in the first place. A Dept of Justice attorney’s job is to ensuring Justice first and foremost to those very same work-a-day folks who died that day and to defend the constitution, not provide civilian criminal trials to war criminals when we are at war. They aren’t citizens; they are jihadists who would no sooner look at you and me than kill us. In the case of KSM, he had already admitted guilt. He was on his way to court and Obama stopped it. Imagine how those families of the USS Cole feel. Just imagine had it been your son or daughter.

Let’s look at it another way. Let’s say I am a business who is entangled in a patent case. I am being accused of stealing a patent. You are one of the young attorney’s at my defense teams firm. Let’s say you have prepared briefs for my attorney’s, doing what young and bright attorney’s do. Later, while the case is still active, but long and drawn out, you quit the firm I hired to defend me, and go to work for the firm who is working for my accusers, or even another firm who is later brought in as 2nd chair to my accuser’s firm.

Is it a conflict of interest for them to hire you? Would my defense team think it would be a conflict, knowing that you know a goodly amount of the defense that I am bringing? Could you potentially build a case around all that known evidence in my defense to help my accuser’s team win the case? What kind of fight would ensue from my defense team against you and your new firm? I would venture to say huge, even if only hired by the newly appointed 2nd chair firm. I would venture to say they would be at that bench for hours convincing the judge that you cannot be anywhere near my case – they would fight that your new firm cannot be anywhere near my case regardless of whether you are officially on the case or not. Who knows what pay off you may have received. Who knows what damage you may cause my case in back door deals, or even how much damage you may cause to the other side if you were so inclined to subvert their case against me. Who’s to know you aren’t playing both sides for some unknown third party interest?

Am I wrong?

So why is this any different? Is it because it is an “unpopular” defense? Not really, because those attorneys became shining stars to the far left’s ideology. Is it because of liberal bias that this case is somehow different? Is it because it is the popular thing to think that jihadists are somehow different than other war criminals? Is it because CAIR is mixed up in here somehow as an interested third party? The same questions my defense team would be raising are the very questions that are arising in the minds of the American people - and frankly, it is pi$$ing us off.

Justice may be blind sir, but she isn’t stupid. She knows when a conflict of interest exists. From my perspective, it is these “Al Qaeda 7” that represent the very definition of a conflict of interest. Our family was fortunate on 9/11, in two cases, with my husband in the air on a different flight (which we thought was flight 93 due to a misstatement made by a reporter) and my brother in law at the Pentagon (who went dark and we didn’t hear from for 2 weeks), we thought we had lost our loved ones and in both cases, thankfully, we hadn’t. But not losing anyone doesn’t make it much better. We still watched those planes loaded with innocents turned into bombs that killed thousands more innocents.

To us, these attorney’s pictures could be laid right beside the word listing “Conflict of Interest” and the definition would speak for itself. I believe that nearly every red-blooded American feels the same as well.

Taxpayers already pay for the war, we already give untold monies to feed the jihadists, Hamas, and the Taliban themselves, and we repatriate them here. To know this, all we must do is to remember the storehouses of undistributed goods and foods we sent to the Iraqi’s during Saddam’s reign. We are losing our special relationships with Israel and the UK. That’s quite enough of the right hand playing the left, don’t you think? We don’t want to add paying for public trials that will give these self-admitted murderers (who call themselves righteous warriors) a pulpit to sound the battle cry anew. The majority of us don’t want them in our prisons proselytizing and recruiting our prisoners. We want them separate and we want them prosecuted by military tribunals. Don’t you get that?

It isn’t undoing what made this a great country, it is doing governments #1 job, protecting the citizens of the United States against all known or perceived threats from inside or outside the Union.

Somehow, I think both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would agree.