Noncitizen Terrorists Don’t Merit Protections

It is with dismay that I read letters that decry military tribunals for terrorists (Nov. 17). Obviously, these writers did not work on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Where in the preamble to the Constitution does it say that we ordain and establish this Constitution so that cowardly, noncitizen terrorists can have the benefit of 200 years of American jurisprudence and get off scot-free because they were not given their Miranda rights?

Is The Times actually advocating that we fight terrorism fair and and square, and may the best man win (“An Un-American Secrecy,” editorial, Nov. 17)? Is it really your intention that we give every constitutional guarantee to Al Qaeda terrorists who would blow L.A. off the map with an atomic bomb? When the White House, the Capitol building and the Supreme Court are smoldering in ashes, is your paper going to demand public defenders and an unlimited trial budget? When hundreds of thousands of children are dying of smallpox, are your publishers going to insist that the death penalty be overturned?

Get hold of yourselves and fight for your--and your country’s--existence with the same determination that Abe Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt fought for this country.

Thomas Z. Taylor

Yucca Valley

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It is disingenuous to defend the president’s executive order regarding military tribunals for noncitizen terrorist suspects by asserting that they do not deserve the benefits of constitutional protection. The administration is either ignorant of or misunderstands the purpose of our constitutional procedures, or it is intentionally misleading the public.

Those procedures are embedded in our legal system not for the benefit of the guilty but to protect the falsely accused.

Ernst Herzberg

San Diego

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Appropriate proceedings for live terrorist conspirators caught by the U.S.: Open trials according to traditional U.S. legal practice.

Appropriate penalty for those convicted: Verbatim memorization of the U.S. Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, to be recited three times each day, facing toward Washington.

Gene Greenstadt

Encino