"Enemy combatants" or "vandals"?

Don't know about anyone else in the USA, but I'd welcome a little global warming just about now. When those buttheads in Copenhagen said 2009 was the hottest year on record, were they just ignoring stats from the northern hemisphere or what? Apparently they did "forget" about the numbers from Russia.

Saw only part of a speech from the Comrade today. Maybe it was today. Coulda been yesterday. Time is just a blur....

Anyway, did the Comrade himself refer to the Nigerian Bomber as a "terrorist," or was that someone from Homeland Security or the State Department or someplace else? Don't tell me even the Comrade is coming to view these "man-made disasters" as something more than low-level criminal activity. 'Course, that would undo all he's done regarding the prisoners at Guantanamo.

Here's an interesting situation. During the US Civil War, the US couldn't recognize the "rebels" as the Confederate States of America, a separate nation, without acknowledging that the CSA actually was a separate nation. See the problem? Like, after the South bombed Fort Sumter -- the first official violence in the war -- Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the "insurrection." If Lincoln or anyone else officially referred to the CSA as the CSA, that would be diplomatic recognition that the CSA was in fact another country apart from the USA, and that, in fact, the CSA had successfully separated itself from the USA. That separaton was never conceded during the war. To this day, the USA regards the Civil War as "The War of Rebellion."

Anyway, it was a bizarre issue.

So the USA had to fight these "insurrectionists" as an internal problem rather than as a foreign enemy, and for crimes that were a little more serious than vandalism. This got rather sticky, because if the rebs were US citizens, then they truly and really did have a claim to all the rights and protections of the US Constitution. And "rules of warfare" did exist at the time. Not written in stone and agreed to, like the Geneva Convention, but a book of rules did exist -- primarily for fighting a foreign enemy.

So how do you lock people up who try to blow up a critical railroad bridge? You can't claim they're foreign invaders, not in a civil war. Yet they're more than teenagers trashing a high school. What do you do about spies, when US citizens ordinarly have the right to visit friends and relatives in jail, and can even carry weapons and such in their hoop skirts? I mean, the Civil War was a real, bloody war, not just an exercise in semantics. How do you get the law to support you?

Look up what's called "The Prize Cases" in the US Supreme Court. This decision involved the USA's confiscation of certain ships and cargo that were actually owned by the British, primarily. They were shipping weapons and other materiel to the CSA. The USA had blockades put up around virtually every major southern port and seized these ships. Can the USA just arbitrarily seize a foreign ship going into a domestic port (from the perspective of the USA, Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans were still "domestic" ports.)

Anyway, so it was the Prize Cases that provided an official legal go-around, or framework maybe, for prosecuting "enemy combatants" whether or not they were citizens of the USA. They were people who were regarded as trying to destroy the USA, no matter where they came from or how they got here.

The Comrade might want to look at those cases. Eric Holder and the ACLU might also check it out. The Prize Cases set a precedent. We've been through all this before, you see.

Interesting, too, that -- and this gets complicated -- is the POW question during the Civil War. After trying to follow the rules of a complicated cartel to exchange and return POWs, Lincoln finally ordered the exchanges be stopped when the North began recruiting black soldiers. Many were runaway slaves and "contrabands" from the South and after the Emancipation Proclamation, were allowed to join the US military. (See the movie, "Glory." It's really pretty good.)

Jeff Davis, CSA president, threatened to sell into slavery any black US soldiers who were captured, and initially said he'd hang their white commanders for "inciting domestic insurrection." He backed down on the white commanders thing for fear of retaliation from the North, but black soldiers fighting for the Union remained targets for special abuse and cruelty at the hands of the CSA.

Despite Lincoln's directive, he did leave the final decision about POWs up to the field commanders... At Gettysburg, and at Lincoln's bidding, General Meade refused an exchange of prisoners suggested by General Robert E. Lee once the cannons had quieted down. But on the same day on the Mississippi River, General U.S. Grant released some 30,000 Confederate POWs when Vicksburg finally fell. Grant didn't want to feed them and guard them. The Vicksburg POWs were supposed to lay down their arms and go home and not fight again (until the CSA released 30,000 US POWs to even things out -- gets complicated.)

But then a few months later, Grant saw these same units on the front lines at the Battle of Chattanooga, and from thence onward, though a few exchanges were made -- mostly of officers, spies, and other civilian partisans -- the USA refused to return soldiers to the South because these guys would pick up arms and head for the front lines. The South was running out of men; Grant saw that as yet another way to bring an end to the war.

The POWs held by both the North and the South were imprisoned through the conclusion of the war. That's why the prison camps got so crowded. If the North wasn't going to return any POWs, the CSA surely wasn't going to either.

Interesting, too, that the people who assassinated Lincoln -- after the war, mind you -- were tried by a military tribunal, not by a civilian court. Henry Wirtz, CSA commander of the POW camp at Andersonville, Georgia, also was tried by a military tribunal -- after the war had come to an end.

Rose Greenhow, a society belle in Washington, DC, when the war broke out, was a southern sympathizer and apparently passed information she collected from Yankee officers to friends of hers in the Confederate Army. She was kept under house arrest, imprisoned for a time, and finally left the USA.

Spies and other similar were tried by military tribunals -- and these spies were, for the most part, still US citizens in the eyes of the North. And they were tried as "enemy combatants" by military tribunals. The CSA had its own military tribunals, too, but in one way it was an easier process for the South, because they regarded the Yankees as "foreign invaders."

So tell me about the legal status of the jerks who blew up the World Trade Center? Why do they rate being mirandized and a civilian trial? Perhaps Attorney General Holder and the Comrade will apply the RICO statutes and treat them like organized crime? Who knows? The prisoners at Guantanamo regard themselves as "enemy combatants" and POWs. Perhaps we all should just drop the very precious political correctness and treat them that way, instead of exhibiting to the world a Kangaroo Court, US-style -- and that's what that civilian trial will be.

I suspect it will be conducted something like Tim McVeigh's trial, which was an absolute travesty of justice -- and I have no doubt at all that McVeigh was guilty of blowing up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The idea of using a prosecutor in a wheel chair -- obvious and even insulting appeal for sympathy -- and calling as "witnesses" the family members of people killed at the Murrah Building -- what a disgrace! The family members properly might have been part of a sentencing trial, but what on earth did they know beforehand about the incident that would help convict Tim McVeigh?

Anyway, I'm cold and tired. And I'm just sick of this administration's complete ignorance of and disregard for US history and traditions. But even the Comrade seems to understand that these islamo-terrorists are dangerous animals. Maybe that's finally beginning to sink in.