Barry Kelly | Facts and Fictions | Author | Facts and Fictions

Insights of Eight Decades #2

The airliner, full of passengers from all walks of life, is in its final landing stages. One of the passengers, an Islamic Jihadist, is preparing to kill every one of them. Only he fails to set off the explosives hidden in his underpants. His actions attract attention from the passengers and crew and he is quickly overcome and taken into custody upon landing. The story should be that he was taken off for interrogation and after some hours or days of questioning, using no torture, he tells his captors all they want to hear and is sent to Gitmo where he is tried by a military tribunal, found guilty and executed. The information gained is used to protect our citizens. End of story.

Not quite. You see we have an Attorney General (AG) who wants to extend some of the rights and protections of United States Citizens to foreign nationals who are trying to kills us. Foreign terrorists, who were not captured on the field of battle or were not wearing a uniform of any recognized nation, have little or no legal protection beyond the requirements of our humanity. Let’s agree there are a few exceptions. Taliban fighters captured on the battle field could be covered by the Geneva Conventions, al Qaeda terrorists are not. In our past wars the terrorists would have been summarily executed.

The AG’s view is supported by a number of well minded citizens who believe every captured foreign terrorist has the protection of our Founding Documents and Law. Therefore, they should be tried in our civilian court system where the rules of evidence and required legal assistance severely limit the prosecution. Evidence collected on the battle field or in the process of apprehending a terrorist organization will often not be permitted in a civilian court. The very process of submitting evidence collected, at some personnel risk, by the military, law enforcement and intelligence organizations threatens the exposure of the sources and methods used by the people trying to protect us.

The underpants bomber is now ‘lawyered up’ and whining about how the FBI violated his rights. Is something wrong here?

INSIGHTS OF EIGHT DECADES

Blogging is new for me. But so was writing of a novel that has just been published, Justice Beyond Law, that is featured on my web page. Since the main reason I pushed aside my inhibitions of web pages and Facebook is that if you want sales, you have to promote your work. No publisher or agent with the resources to advertise a new author’s book is interested in a writer who has celebrated his 80th birthday. I have a stack of reject letters to underscore my statement. After all a writer or story-teller, which is what I really am, is not going to produce ten more books after reaching 80 years old. Fortunately, I found a new publisher/author only a few years younger than me willing to take a chance. With a small, and I mean small, advertising budget I must depend upon the readers of the book and word of mouth to spread the word.

The first rule I followed is that you must write about things you know. I didn’t need to do any research to write this book. It is all from personal experiences and that of others in the defense of freedom with varying degrees of help from my imagination. If the truth be known, the creation of strong characters will almost take over the writing of the novel. In this novel, besides telling a good story, I wanted the readers to understand the difficulties of fighting foreign enemies in the face of well-meaning rules, regulations and political sensitivities that severely limited the effectiveness of the law and order approach to building cases with evidence that will stand up in the courts. Oversight is critical to the freedoms we enjoy but there is a grey and expanding world between oversight and management that must be constantly reviewed.

In my next book, Justice Without Mercy, I’ll describe the clash between law and order and national security.

Thank you,

Storyteller