Hammering Krauthammer

[Demeter]

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post Op-Ed Columnist, has been getting some unflattering attention lately--all of it well-deserved. Two mentions listed here:

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/07/con06299.html

The Washington Post's War Mongering Scribe

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Mike Whitney

The war on terrorism many people believe is an endless war. It is not. It is a war which is winnable. ... I would venture a guess that this war is winnable in five years. -- Charles Krauthammer, Iraq Victory Speech to American Enterprise Institute, April 2003

Charles Krauthammer is a signatory of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (the group which called for the ouster of Saddam) and the unofficial spokesman for the war mongering neoconservatives. He was a main proponent of the war in Iraq and has since led the cheerleading for the occupation.

It’s always handy reading Krauthammer to find out what the current thinking is among administration power brokers. His articles are a window into the emergent fantasies of the Bush brain-trust. In fact, it’s astonishing how efficiently Rumsfeld and Cheney’s sinister ideas are channeled into Krauthammer’s keyboard.

In this week’s article, “Drying up the Jihadist Sea,” Krauthammer has taken a sudden about-face and abandoned his normally strident militarism. Instead, he devotes his entire column to promoting “amnesty” for the members of the Iraqi resistance. This abrupt change of heart would have been inconceivable just a few months ago.

Are things really so bad in Iraq that the fire-breathing Krauthammer is ready to send up the white flag?

Krauthammer does an admirable job of dressing it up, but the bottom line is, the Bush team is tossing in the towel and calling it a day.

According to Krauthammer, Swaggering George knows all about the amnesty plan and “is firmly behind this policy.”

It is shocking that the Washington Post hasn’t thrown Krauthammer out on the street and given his seat to a responsible adult who knows the difference between foreign policy and the malignant dreams of fantasists.

Mike Whitney

AND THESE WORDS COME FROM THE "HAMMER" HIMSELF:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/06/AR2006070601552.html?referrer=email

Emergency Over, Saith the Court

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 7, 2006; A17



1861. 1941. 2001. Our big wars -- and the war on terrorism ranks with the big ones -- have a way of starting in the first year of a decade. Supreme Courts, which historically have been loath to intervene against presidential war powers in the midst of conflict, have tended to give the president until mid-decade to do what he wishes to the Constitution in order to win the war.

During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus -- trashing the Bill of Rights or exercising necessary emergency executive power, depending on your point of view. But he got the whole troublesome business done by 1865, and the Supreme Court stayed away.

During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans. He, too, was left unmolested by the court. But Roosevelt also got his war wrapped up by 1945. Had the current war on terrorism followed course and ended in 2005, the sensational, just-decided Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case concerning military tribunals for Guantanamo Bay prisoners would have either been rendered moot or drawn a yawn.

But, of course, the war on terrorism is different. The enemy is shadowy, scattered and therefore more likely to survive and keep the war going for years. What the Supreme Court essentially did in Hamdan was to say to the president: Time's up. We gave you the customary half-decade of emergency powers, but that's as far as we go. From now on the emergency is over, at least judicially, and you're going to have to operate by peacetime rules.

Or, as Justice Anthony Kennedy, the new Sandra Day O'Connor, put it, Guantanamo (and by extension, war-on-terrorism) jurisprudence must henceforth be governed by "the customary operation of the Executive and Legislative Branches." This case may be "of extraordinary importance," but it is to be "resolved by ordinary rules."

All rise: The Supreme Court has decreed a return to normality. A lovely idea, except that al-Qaeda has other ideas. The war does go on. One can sympathize with the court's desire for a Harding-like restoration to normalcy. But the robed eminences are premature. And even if they weren't, they really didn't have to issue a ruling this bad.

They declared illegal President Bush's military tribunals for the likes of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver and bodyguard. First, because they were not established in accordance with congressional authority. And, second, because they violated the Geneva Conventions.

The first rationale is an odd but fixable misreading of congressional intent. The second is a grotesque and unfixable misreading of the Geneva Conventions.

The court feels that the president slighted Congress by unilaterally establishing military commissions. What is odd about this solicitousness for the powers of the legislature is that Congress, which is populated entirely by adults, had explicitly told the judiciary just six months ago that when it comes to Guantanamo prisoners, the judiciary should bug off.

The Detainee Treatment Act in December 2005 not only implicitly endorsed what the administration was doing with prisoners, it explicitly told the judiciary to leave the issue to Congress and the president to resolve, as they have historically.

The court's wanton overriding of Congress and the president is another in a long string of breathtaking acts of judicial arrogance. But it is fixable. The Republican leadership of the Senate responded to the court's highhandedness by immediately embarking on writing legislation to establish military tribunals.

The unfixable part of the Hamdan ruling, however, is the court's reading of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Conventions, which were designed to protect civilian populations and those combatants who respect them, were never intended to apply to unlawful combatants, terrorists of the al-Qaeda kind. The court tortures the reading of Common Article 3 to confer upon Hamdan -- and by extension the man for whom he rode shotgun, bin Laden -- the kind of elaborate legal protections that one expects from "civilized peoples."

This infinitely elastic concept will allow courts to usurp from Congress and the president the authority to fashion the procedures for military tribunals -- an arrogation that mocks the court's previously expressed solicitousness for congressional authority.

But no matter. Logic has little place here. The court has decreed: There is no war -- or we will pretend so -- and henceforth it shall be conducted by the court. God save the United States. (This honorable court can fend for itself.)

[e-mail]


ENOUGH SAID.

[Oceansaway]

1. i cant stand him....n/t

[TheCowsCameHome]

2. He reminds me of one of those Moai heads on Easter Island

Besides, I can't stand him anyway.