Foreign Terrorists Should Not be Tried in the American Civilian Justice System

After an eight-week trial in federal court, a jury acquitted Ahmed Abu Khatallah on fourteen counts for his role in the 2012 attack on the American embassy in the Libyan city of Benghazi, but found him guilty of four additional and mostly peripheral charges. This odd outcome, argues Andrew McCarthy, is a product of a flawed system for trying terrorists like Abu Khatalla, where the only alternative to an inadequate civilian court system are the equally inadequate military courts:

Progressives fantasize that all national-security challenges can be resolved by lawsuits and diplomatic gambits—fallaciously reasoning that, because a conflict may not have a military solution, the solution should not have a military component. They insist that the civilian justice system “works” for terrorism because the comparatively few terrorists who are tried get convicted of at least something. . . . But apologists for civilian due process ignore that most terrorists cannot even be apprehended, much less tried in our judicial system. Most terrorist planning and attacks occur in dangerous territories where our investigative agencies do not operate and the writ of our courts does not run. . . .

[T]he main challenge [is that] it is impossible to try terrorists under civilian due-process protocols without providing them generous discovery from the government’s intelligence files. This means we are telling the enemy what we know about the enemy while the enemy is still plotting to attack Americans and American interests. That’s nuts.

The patent downsides of treating international terrorism as a law-enforcement issue are why critics, myself included, were hopeful that a shift to military prosecution of enemy combatants would improve matters—more protection of intelligence, and due process limited by the laws and customs of war.

[But] we were wrong. The experiment has been a dismal failure. To catalogue all the delays, false starts, and misadventures of the military-commission system would take another essay. Suffice it to say that it was unfair and unrealistic to task our armed forces with designing a legal system on the fly even as they fought a complex war in which, unlike prior American wars, swaths of the American legal profession backed the enemy—volunteering to represent jihadist belligerents in challenges to military detention and prosecution.

As an alternative, McCarthy proposes the creation of a “national-security” court to handle such cases independently.

Read more at National Review

More about: American law, Politics & Current Affairs, War on Terror

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society