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Politics : Hanoi john Should Be Court Martialed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (270)	3/7/2004 5:50:54 PM
From: PROLIFE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 681

THE KERRY DOCTRINE John Kerry, as we've noted, sees terrorism as "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation," not a war, and the Germans have come forth with another example of the perils of the Kerry Doctrine. The BBC reports: A German court has quashed the world's only conviction over the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US. Mounir al-Motassadek was jailed as an accessory to more than 3,000 murders, and for membership of the Hamburg al-Qaeda cell behind the attacks. . . . The presiding judge said the evidence against him had not been sufficient for a conviction. "The fight against terrorism cannot be a wild, unjust war," Klaus Tolksdorf said. "A conflict between the security interests of the executive and the rights to defence of the accused cannot be resolved to the disadvantage of the accused." Last month, as we noted, a German court acquitted Abdelghani Mzoudi, a former roommate of honcho hijacker Mohamed Atta, and a judge told him: "You are acquitted. Not because the court is convinced of your innocence, but because the evidence was not enough to convict you." Mzoudi went free; Motassadek at least faces a new trial. Meanwhile, London's Guardian reports that "German public prosecutors are investigating the makers of the German version of I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! after viewers complained about the deaths of a number of goldfish." The criminal-justice system is designed to value procedure over outcome. This is entirely fitting in a case of piscicide, and it's a trade-off worth making even when dealing with crimes against human beings. But we are at war with an enemy that seeks to destroy our civilization, an enemy that observes no civilized rules of combat. Defining that conflict as merely a criminal justice matter risks tying the hands of the government as it tries to protect citizens from atrocities that could be far worse than Sept. 11. Civil libertarians, too, should be wary of treating terrorism as primarily a criminal-justice matter. If we are relying on the courts to protect us from attack, judges may be inclined to scale back the rights of terrorist defendants, establishing precedents that would inevitably apply to nonterror defendants as well. opinionjournal.com