LOS ANGELES (AP) - A federal judge struck down President Bush's 
authority to designate groups as terrorists, saying his post-Sept. 11 executive order was unconstitutionally vague, according to a ruling released Tuesday. The Humanitarian Law Project had challenged Bush's order, which blocked all the assets of groups or individuals he named as "specially designated global terrorists" after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

"This law gave the president unfettered authority to create blacklists," said David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights that represented the group. "It was reminiscent of the McCarthy era."

The case centered on two groups, the Liberation Tigers, which seeks a separate homeland for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, and Partiya Karkeran Kurdistan, a political organization representing the interests of Kurds in Turkey.

We'll set aside the fact that some of us out here have looked at the facts, and believe Senator McCarthy's black list was both needed and correct.  We will not even present the arguments made by Hollywood star, Ronald Reagan, about the insidious damage done to the nation by unfettered Hollywood leftists freed to lie about the benefits of socialism  and the imagined evils of traditional America.

We'll just ask one simple question, here.

A political organization which represents the interests of Kurds in Turkey?  Which Kurds in Turkey? Did they migrate to Turkey or did Turkey expand its borders to encompass them? Were they gassed by Saddam Hussein's air force, like the Kurds across the present Turkish border in northern Iraq?  In this latter example, I'm talking here about the Kurds who live in one of the two large parts of Iraq which has exploding parked automobiles about as often as meteors the size of Mt. Everest hit the Earth, wiping out almost all life on the planet.  The AP doesn't do much news about northern Iraq because those people -- clearly unlike this "Kurdish organization protecting the rights of Kurds in Turkey" --  love George Bush and are using their abundant energy and freedom from the Dictator Hussein and his thugs to turn their part of Iraq into a bustling, peaceful, thriving region.

The Kurds in Turkey have an organization representing the interests of  Kurds in Turkey?  How many Kurds are there in Turkey and what percentage of them belong to this organization?  Better yet, what are these "interests?"  Why weren't they named in this article by the famous Associated Press?  Shall we pose the question?  Who is really behind this organization, and what has its American branch office been doing that raised the president's ire?  I repeat, the Kurds of northern Iraq love Bush.  They love America.  They daily praise and thank God for America.

Why, then, this trouble with a supposedly Kurd-favoring organization?  Seriously folks, the whole thing smells.  The organization smells, the judge smells, American liberalism, particularly in the press, smells.  There is a story here, alright, but it is presented by the AP about as accurately as current liberal press reports about South Africa.

There is, in the American liberal judge, a strange, compelling need to give to non-citizens the Constitutional rights of citizens. Perhaps judges who do this should be stopped from doing so.

(LL) 

© 2006 Oregon Magazine