LET’S SEE…U.S. CITIZEN, CRIME ON U.S. SOIL…ENEMY COMBATANT? HMM…

4/20/13

No sooner had murderous thug Dzhokhar Tsarnaev been captured than did Senator John McCain and his mini-me from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, call for him to be tried as an enemy combatant.  

I’m not a lawyer, having dropped out of law school in one of the few smart career moves I’ve ever made.  But it seems to me that it would be well nigh impossible to try a U.S. citizen who committed a crime in the United States as an enemy combatant.  Even the lawyers who appeared as guest on Fox News (And Fox News would normally be amenable to Mr. McCain’s line of “reasoning” on this issue.) said that to call for Tsarnaev to be tried as an enemy combatant shows a, to put it politely, misunderstanding of the law.

Senator Graham argues that his desire that  Tsarnaev be tried as an enemy combatant in Guantanamo arises from the Senator’s concern that Mirandizing the killer might deprive of us “valuable intelligence.”  Yours truly is not in favor of dispensing with Mirandizing Mr. Tsarnaev (See yesterday’s post BRIAN WILLIAMS:  THE KILLERS OF CHILDREN ARE “TWO DISAFFECTED YOUNG PEOPLE WHO ACTED OUT.”) for fear of giving his still to be determined legal team a potentially effective defensive, or obstructive, tool.  

More importantly, however, I suspect that Senators Graham and McCain are not being entirely truthful (Cue Claude Rains here…I’m shocked, shocked! that two politicians are obscuring the truth.) about their motives for wanting Tsarnaev tried as an enemy combatant.  Given Messrs. McCain and Graham’s long held enthusiasm for getting the U.S. involved in wars for what looks like even the flimsiest of reasons, it would not be too cynical to suggest that these two would like Tsarnaev tried as an enemy combatant so that the Senators and their henchmen could cook up some premise, some ruse, to get us involved in some war with somebody over the Boston bombings.

It’s hard to know whether the enthusiasm of Messrs. McCain and Graham, and the bipartisan War Party of whom they are perhaps the two most salient members, for armed conflict arises from a misplaced equation of militarism with patriotism or a desire to keep your tax dollars flowing to the defense contractors who underwrite the lifelong ego gratification exercises these estimables call careers.  If the former, members of the War Party are witless dupes.   If the latter, they are complicit in war profiteering.  Neither alternative provides comfort to the citizenry.