What’s the Difference Between McVeigh and Tsarnaev?

[xiinfaniin]

What’s the Difference Between McVeigh and Tsarnaev?

By ANDREW ROSENTHAL

 

 

The federal government managed to hunt down, arrest, charge, try, convict and execute Timothy McVeigh without junking due process.

 

When Jared Lee Loughner attempted to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and shot dead a federal judge and a 9-year-old, grandstanding lawmakers did not demand that he be taken into military custody. Nor did they make that demand when James Holmes was arrested for killing 12 people and wounding 70 others at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater.

 

But now Senator Lindsey Graham is calling for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to be classified as an enemy combatant and “held and questioned under the law of war,” without a lawyer.

 

What’s the difference? The Boston Marathon bombings are closer to the colloquial and legal definitions of terrorism than the Aurora shooting, but not the Oklahoma bombing, or the Arizona attack.

 

The real difference is that Mr. Tsarnaev is a Muslim, and the United States has since the 9/11 terrorist attacks constructed a separate and profoundly unequal system of detention and punishment that essentially applies only to Muslims.

 

Mr. Graham and others who are demanding that prosecutors treat Mr. Tsarnaev differently from Mr. McVeigh are not even trying very hard to disguise the fact that they’re drawing distinctions based on religion and ethnicity.

 

“You can’t hold every person who commits a terrorist attack as an enemy combatant, I agree with that,” Mr. Graham said. “But you have a right, with his radical Islamist ties and the fact that Chechens all over the world are fighting with Al Qaeda.”

 

There is no known evidence of “radical Islamist ties.” As Senator Dianne Feinstein said on Fox News on Sunday, “This came at this point from two individuals. That’s what we really do know. We do not know what their connections are.” The younger Mr. Tsarnaev is an American citizen. He came here as a child, and never traveled to Chechnya.

 

To repeat: The argument that we should treat Mr. Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant boils down to his religion and his ethnic origin. This is the kind of logic that led the United States to imprison Japanese-Americans during World War 2, and to far worse acts of ethnically and racially motivated violence in other countries. Should the Boston police be rounding up every Chechen who lives in the area and turning them over to the military for questioning?

 

If Mr. Tsarnaev is guilty of the bombings, then he committed a heinous crime, an act of terrorism under American law for which there are severe penalties, including execution. The federal judicial system has put hundreds of people into America’s toughest prisons on charges exactly like the ones he is likely to face.

 

The Supreme Court ruled in 2004, in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, that the United States has the right to hold an American citizen as an enemy combatant — when he is captured on a battlefield in another country. The author of that decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, went out of her way to mention the “narrow” applicability of the ruling.

 

So far, the White House and the Justice Department have said they will charge and try Mr. Tsarnaev in federal court. They have said they will not treat him as an enemy combatant. That is the right course.

 

2:16 p.m. | Updated

The Times is reporting that Mr. Tsarnaev will be tried in civilian court. He was charged on Monday with one count of “using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction” against persons and property within the U.S. resulting in death, and one count of “malicious destruction of property by means of an explosive device resulting in death.”

 

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/whats-the-difference-between-mcveigh-and-tsarnaev/

[Baashi]

The author of this piece should take solace from the fact that Obama WH has refused to head the unsoliceted advice from the likes of Sen. Linsey Graham who is up for re-election in the deep south state of SC.