Michael Ryan is too Lazy to Look up the Name of a Supreme Court Case

Re: "There's no right to treason," from the June 27th edition of the Augusta Chronicle editorial page.

This editorial is just so one-sided and extreme that I couldn't let it pass. Mr. Ryan accuses Supreme Court justices who dissented from the majority opinion in Holder, attorney general vs. Humanitarian Law Project of being treasonous. While I agree with the majority opinion in this case, accusing the justices in the minority of being traitors, simply because they hold a different viewpoint, is ridiculous and destroys Mr. Ryan's credibility.

This case is not as clear cut and black and white as Mr. Ryan leads the reader to believe. There is lots of gray area here.

The name of the case as I pointed out earlier is Holder, the attorney general vs. Humanitarian Law Project. Mr. Ryan was either too lazy to even look up the name of the case, so the reader could research it further and know what he was referring to, or he didn't want to give the name for other reasons that I can only guess at. Maybe he didn't want to admit being on the same side of the case as the Attorney General because he's called for his resignation or removal. Maybe he knows supporting a decision against an organization with the name "Humanitarian," looks bad.

In any case here's what this ruling is about: Some charities give non violent aid to organizations that the government has determined have ties to terrorists. In other words they send food and materials for housing, and medicine to poor people around the world. Some of these charities give this aid to organizations that support many different groups which may include some the government deems terrorists. It's difficult for charities to give this aid, if they have to weed out which members of these groups are terrorists and which are not. Most unfair of all is how the government defines terrorism. In this particular case the government declared that the Kurdistan Workers Party was a terrorist organization. The only reason the Kurdistan Workers Party was declared a terrorist organization was to placate Turkey for diplomatic reasons. The Kurdistan Workers Party favors an independent homeland for Kurds, an ethnic group that lives on the border of Iraq and Turkey. They aren't really even a terrorist group.

I agree that terrorists shouldn't be given any kind of aid, even humanitarian. But there are problems with the government defining which organizations are terrorists. And it is kind of an unfair burden on charities to expect them to try to discern exactly which poor people this food, medicine, and money for shelter goes to.

There's also a freedom of speech issue here where individuals may be prosecuted because of guilt by association. They know and politically support charities that are distantly related to organizations that are distantly related to terrorists. They may be afraid to support such causes for fear of being persecuted by the government.

It's a bad law that needs to be fixed legislatively. Mr. Ryan can't seriously consider the Jimmy Carter Foundation, and other charities that filed friends of the court briefs for the Humanitarian Law Project, terrorist support groups and traitors.