Federal Judge Rules That The President Isn’t Allowed To Classify Groups As Terrorists
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.
U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins enjoined the government from blocking the assets of the two groups. . . .
A White House spokeswoman declined to immediately comment. At the time of his order creating the list, Bush declared that the “grave acts of terrorism” and the “continuing and immediate threat of future attacks” constituted a national emergency.
The judge’s 45-page ruling was a reversal of her own tentative findings last July in which she indicated she would uphold wide powers asserted by Bush under an anti-terror financing law. She delayed her ruling then to allow more legal briefs to be filed.
She also struck down the provision in which Bush had authorized the secretary of the treasury to designate anyone who “assists, sponsors or provides services to” or is “otherwise associated with” a designated group.
However, she let stand sections of the order that penalize those who provide “services” to designated terrorist groups. She said such services would include the humanitarian aid and rights training proposed by the plaintiffs.
So, if the President isn’t allowed to determine which groups are and are not terrorists then who is? Congress? Judges? Will we now have to organize a vote in Congress or file a lawsuit in a court to get a determination on whether or not a group like al Qaeda or Hezbollah is engaged in terrorism? And if so, what kind of nonsense is that? It seems to me that determining who is and is not our enemy in the world is exactly what we elect a chief executive and commander-in-chief of the military to do.
I’d point out that this Humanitarian Law Project, along with the lawyer David Cole named in the article, were both involved with another lawsuit that resulted in this same judge (a Clinton appointee, naturally) ruling parts of the Patriot Act that banned groups and individuals from providing expert counsel and services to terrorist group was unconstitutional as well. So you see what’s going on here. First these people had to succeed in making it legal for them to leverage the legal system to get their terrorist clients off the hook, now they’re using that gained leverage to manipulate the legal system to keep our President from even classifying these monsters as terrorists.
And make no mistake about it, groups like the Tamil Tigers are involved in terrorism. But don’t take my word for it, just peruse this list of terror attacks launched by the Tamils.
It absolutely blows my mind that groups like this are now getting protection from judges in the U.S. judicial system.
I thought it was the President’s job to set foreign policy, not district court judges.
