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| The Supreme Court upholds an important terrorism law |
| 2010-06-23 |
| For a dozen years, leftist organizations styling themselves as proponents of international humanitarian law have campaigned to undermine the laws prohibiting material support to terrorism. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court finally swept aside this challenge, forcefully upholding one of our nation's most crucial counterterrorism tools. Chief Justice John Roberts's opinion for the 6--3 majority in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project is a smashing victory for the rationale of material-support laws, which bar various forms of aid to formally designated "foreign terrorist organizations" (FTOs) on the ground that any meaningful assistance -- however ostensibly innocent or virtuous -- strengthens these groups. (I have been writing about the Humanitarian Law litigation here at NRO for a number of years -- see here, here, and here -- and joined an amicus brief supporting the constitutionality of the material-support laws, both in my individual capacity and as co-chairman of the Center for Law & Counterterrorism, a joint project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the National Review Institute.) The principle operating here is that terrorism is barbaric, contravening both international law's imperative to protect civilians and the civilized international norms that promote resolution of political disputes by negotiation, not assassination. Therefore, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the two terrorist organizations at issue in the epic Humanitarian Law litigation, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan, or PKK), must be treated as pariahs, ostracized and suffocated until they either are annihilated or convincingly abandon terrorism as a method. This would seem to be common sense. Yet transnational progressives, under the auspices of "humanitarian law," have hitched their wagons to the terrorists' stars. Their aim is to promote their post-sovereign agenda, the subordination of national-security concerns to the "engagement" of terrorists in multilateral processes. The Humanitarian Law Project contended that the material-support laws' ban on providing training, expert advice, services, or personnel to FTOs stymied their desire to, example, train terrorists "to use humanitarian and international law to peacefully resolve disputes," to teach them "how to petition various representative bodies such as the United Nations for relief," to conduct political advocacy on the terrorists' behalf, to offer their legal expertise to help the terrorists negotiate peace agreements, to show the Tamil Tigers how to "present claims for tsunami relief to mediators and international bodies," and so on. |
| Posted by:Fred |