Redstate

and your constitutional right to commit it

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Unsurprisingly, the Washington Post is not ecstatic about the indictment of Adam Gadahn for treason.

After giving the Administration a golf clap for adhering to the odious overreach by the judiciary in Hamdi

If the government wants to lock them up for supporting the enemy, the justices said, the Constitution specifies how it may do so: Charge them with treason or some similar crime.

That is what the Justice Department did last week to Adam Gadahn, an American-born operative who had been making videotapes for al-Qaeda. The first such charge in decades marks a significant change of course. Instead of causing him to disappear into military custody, as it did with Mr. Hamdi, the government is following a road explicitly laid out in the Constitution.

Broadly speaking, this is a constructive development. Unlike the murky terrain governing the holding of American citizens as enemy combatants, treason is defined in the Constitution.

And from there proceeds to a startling conclusion.

Read on.

Yet treason charges could come to pose civil liberties concerns of their own. The Constitution cannot, by definition, be unconstitutional -- yet its definition of treason is so broad and vague that, were it merely written in statute, it would probably be so. It consists of "levying war" against the United States or "adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort" -- language that has been used to convict people of propagandizing on behalf of enemy powers. Where exactly that bleeds into protected speech is no easy question.

One sees immediately why the definition of treason makes the Washington Post editorial board queasy. If they vacation in the Caribbean (how déclassé) they would prefer it not be at Club Gitmo and definitely not preceded by Donald Rumsfeld’s bully boys kicking in their door, being flexi-cuffed, tossed in a blacked out LearJet with bogus registration numbers, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and then allotted a no-amenities guest room with Abdul.

Of course they prefer emanations and penumbras and implied rights in preference to the words that thundered forth from our Founding Fathers:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.

Just as we had decided, without the Republic falling, that libel, slander, threats, praying the Rosary outside an abortion clinic and perjury are not covered by the First Amendment, for that matter neither is a lot of political speech since McCain-Feingold, we can sure address the simple issue of treason.

Let’s start with the text. How about if you levy war against the United States, or if you demonstrate in support of our enemies, or raise money or supplies for our enemies, or publish secret material that would provide our enemies with operational details of a national security program you go to Leavenworth for a long, long time? I’ll even be generous and stipulate that we have to be engaged in a shooting war with said enemies as much as it pains me to let the morons in the Nuclear Freeze movement off the hook.

How do you handle dissent? Dissent away buddy-boy until the first shot is fired then commit the words “adhering to their enemies, and giving them aid and comfort” to memory. I don’t care what some Republicans did in Kosovo, we need one set of rules of conduct for American citizens irrespective of which party occupies the White House.

There. Simple. I’m willing to live with the rules. Will the Post?