'Students' of death
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED NOV. 2, 2001
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
'Students' of death
In the face of emotional calls to "round up and deport" foreigners -- especially those from Arab countries, which sent us all the known mass murderers of Sept. 11 -- President Bush responded with a properly measured call Monday for a crackdown on those who abuse America's liberal student-visa provisions.
About 600,000 foreigners are admitted to America each year on student visas. The federals have concluded that Hani Hanjour, one of the men suspected of hijacking the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, entered the United States last December on a student visa after promising to enroll at Holy Names College in Oakland, Calif ... where he never bothered to show up.
Meantime, Mohamed Atta, suspected of being at the controls of one of the two jets that crashed into the World Trade Center, was allowed to enter the country after immigration officials determined he had a pending application for a student visa.
The president said Monday his administration will "tighten up the visa policy" and keep an eye on students after they arrive.
Mr. Bush thus takes modest steps which still leave America one of the most open and accessible of nations. That's appropriate. No one -- except perhaps our enemies -- wants to see America haul up its drawbridges and covert itself into a medieval castle under siege.
The more troubling question is what to do with the tiny minority of those who abuse our visa system, coming to this country with the express intent of terror and murder ... even when they're caught.
Our constitutional guarantee of due process -- our fine traditions of the presumption of innocence, the right to counsel, our bans on torture; incarceration without trial; on cruel and unusual punishment -- are part of what make us free and great. These cannot be sacrificed. In fact, officials who violate these constitutional guarantees should, themselves, be indicted and put on trial.
But this system of peacetime, civil jurisprudence is ill-suited to dealing with foreign agents intent on mayhem -- as we see now, with civil libertarians rightly protesting the detention of so many suspicious foreign nationals after the events of Sept. 11, in some cases subjected to "diesel therapy" as they're shifted from place to place to keep their attorneys from locating them and filing appropriate paperwork for their release.
That has to end. But at the same time, are we obliged to send likely terrorists home when we catch them, like illegal farmworkers being loaded on a bus back to Tijuana for a brief vacation? Doesn't that simply encourage our enemies to infiltrate us again and again, playing the odds that even those caught will merely be returned for "another try"?
There is an answer. There is a proper constitutional provision to suspend these rights for foreign nationals. It is contained in the Section 8 power of Congress to "declare War, [and] grant letters of Marque and Reprisal ..."
If the president means to go to war -- most would define what's happening in Afghanistan as war, already -- and if he needs the leeway to extend that war at his discretion from Al-Qaida to include Hammas, Hezbollah, the PLO, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and any other nation whose royal family can be shown to have funded or aided bin Laden, in order to totally destroy those responsible for these attacks against America and those who aid them -- then let him request from the Congress a declaration of war and letters of marque against all those responsible for the attacks against this nation. Let the enemies be named in open debate; let the vote be taken; let the world be advised they have awakened the sleeping giant and filled him with a righteous wrath.
The president could take his lead here from Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1941 asked not just for a declaration of war, but for a declaration that a state of war had existed from Dec. 7, 1941.
In today's case, if a state of war has existed on and since Sept. 11, then the treatment of Nazi spies on these shores in 1942 tells us how foreign agents who entered this country under false pretenses and remained here on or after Sept. 11 with plans of terror should be treated.
The German spies who landed by submarine in Florida and on Long Island in 1942 were rounded up, quickly tried by military tribunals on charges of being enemy soldiers out of uniform, shot without fanfare, and buried in unmarked graves.
Was Abdul Haq -- one of their own countrymen -- treated with any more deference before his Taliban brethren shot him last week? Were the 16 worshippers murdered at a Christian church in Pakistan Sunday provided with "due process"?
The Taliban clearly believe they are at war -- a war in which none of the old, decadent western rules apply. President Bush must simply tell us now whether we, too, are in a ruthless and unlimited war to the death ... and if not, what the heck our boys are doing in Afghanistan.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Subscribe to his monthly newsletter by sending $72 to Privacy Alert, 561 Keystone Ave., Suite 684, Reno, NV 89503 -- or dialing 775-348-8591.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
