Cowboy Confessional

A military tribunal asserts jurisdiction over persons held in military custody and stand accused of being enemies who have violated a law of war.

Incompetency can be a collective trait as well as an individual affliction.

Take the case of Eric Holder, the temporary attorney general in the temporary Obama administration. In the world of constitutional law, central principles and obvious conclusions are common. The nation’s lead lawyer needs to be competent, which means understanding The Law. Yet before taking the Justice Department helm, Holder signed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court Heller handgun ban case, arguing that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” was not a right, nor of the people.

All nine of the Supremes concluded the opposite (though four robed bandits argued that the right could be modified by legislation).

Little is plainer in American law than our list of enumerated prerogatives, quaintly called the Bill of Rights. So solid was the assumption that the Second Amendment, like the others nine, conferred an individual right, that this interpretation was called the standard model. Yet Holder’s incompetency led him to humiliation by publicly arguing the inane opposite.

Which in turn led him to be nominated by Obama to take the top job at the Justice Department.

Like birds with similar plumage, incompetents tend to cluster but congregate around the most maladroit member. And as another failed politician noted “The fish rots from the head down.” In recent weeks we have seen serial incompetency from the Obama Bunch, including but certainly not limited to:

• Scaring women from coast to coast with new and mixed messages about breast cancer
• Ram-rodding a health insurance bill that the 85% of people with coverage oppose
• Bowing to an Emperor though it is not part of American presidential protocol
• A “stimulus” job creation tracking web site that listed non-existent jobs in non-existent congressional districts

But the best of the worst, the cream of the crap if you will, was Holder’s decision to bring Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to New York for trial. Ignore if you can that Khalid confessed to the war crime that was 9/11, that the military tribunal is the normal venue for trying such case, that Khalid was already “in process” under a military tribunal and that he asked for a conviction and execution. Ignore too – if possible – the inevitable terrorist activities that will be planned and probably executed once Khalid and his co-conspirators are in the Big Apple. Ignore again that the procedures in civil trials allow Khalid’s lawyer to obtain sensitive intelligence information. Ignore that never before has an enemy combatant caught on the battlefield has been tried in civilian court, but Holder was unaware of this and responded to questioning saying that he would “have to look at that.” The combined loss of opportunity (discontinuing a military tribunal which would have most likely resulted in a conviction) and the increased danger to civilians (very few of those at Guantanamo) makes Holder’s decision incompetent beyond even Obama’s standards.

Naiveté creates one brand of incompetence.

When grilled by Senators about his demented decision, Holder made a series of statements that displayed his denseness (as if it were in doubt). Most instructive of his inanities was his assumption that in getting a conviction “failure is not an option”, like the failure he encountered convincing the Supreme Court to ignore a standard model and the right of the people. In simple civil trials, there is always the possibility of procedural errors that let criminals escape on a technicality. Hung juries can lead to acquittals. Terrorists blowing up a court house can nullify a conviction.

Failure may not be an ‘option’ but it can be an outcome, the probability of which is increased if an incompetent is in charge of prosecution and if another is his boss.

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