As a lawyer, I can tell you that you can get a lawyer to give AN OPINION as to the interpretation of “the law” that will support any position (or proposed plan of action). Some opinions are better supported by “the law” than others, but there are lawyers who are willing to support, or are themselves in favor of, one political agenda over another
Roger C. Cramton, a law professor at Cornell University, who wrote in the 1970s that “the ordinary religion of the law school classroom” is “a moral relativism tending toward nihilism, a pragmatism tending toward an amoral instrumentalism… I think that applies here.
If you behave like a terrorist because you claim you are “fighting terrorism”, you are a hypocrite and unworthy of the values you claim to be fighting for. Period.
I am no pacifist, I just would not proceed in the manner the military industrial complex favors. In case you have not noticed, their methods have failed to dent terrorism, we are losing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iraq will have a civil war the moment the USA leaves. We are losing the ‘100 Year War on Terra’, not winning it, and that is our fault. The terrorists just keep on doing what they do, terrorizing, regardless. It is up to us to change our tactics and strategy, if we want to defeat their ideology.
Terrorism is a crime, all aspects are criminal, it does not require special laws, or a police state to defeat it. It is a matter of surveillance, good police/intelligence work, the occasional special forces raid, co-ordinated with allies world wide. Large scale invasions and WWII style campaigns won’t, they just destroy the countryside and slaughter innocents, making more recruits for the terrorists. It’s not that hard to understand. Reports of sexual and physical abuses around the world to do stop extremist ideology. They exacerbate it. In fact, one could argue that stopping terrorism is not even a policy of the USG because their methods are so incomprehensibly counterproductive.
But Americans don’t want justice they want revenge and they don’t care about freedom, they care about comfort and they would trade humanity for patriotism in a second. This is our undoing.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.‘ -Voltaire
