RUSH: We go to the Janesville, Wisconsin. Terry, nice to have you here. You’re up first. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush, and thank you for taking my call.
RUSH: You bet.
RUSH: You’re a proud member in good standing of the club.
CALLER: Well, I’ll — and here’s my other thought. I think the Club Gitmo gear needs to have a T-shirt that says, ‘Our Supreme Court judges need to be sent to Gitmo,’ or better yet, placed in the hands of the people who capture our soldiers and see firsthand exactly what rights they’re given.
RUSH: That’s an interesting vision, but it’s not all of them. It’s five of them. It’s the leftist judges.
CALLER: I realize that.
RUSH: It’s the leftist judges. You know, the judges who think we ought to be looking into foreign law to find out how to adjudicate cases here, and Anthony Kennedy, who in this case was the swing vote and wrote the opinion. But, look, I’m just as angry about it as you are. It’s fun sight to think of, all these different five justices being held in captivity say in Pakistan.
CALLER: Absolutely. Now, you tell because I’m not totally knowledgeable on this, is there any way this can be overturned and changing or is this done deal and sealed forever?
RUSH: Yes, but it’s going to stand for a while. What’s unique about this case is this is the third loss for the administration on the same premise, and after the first two losses, the administration went back and they got the sanction of Congress — essentially a new statute establishing military tribunals and so forth — and the Supreme Court overruled that today. That’s how you get past the Supreme Court, is you pass another law. In this case they wrote the law themselves, they just invented it. They ignored the law as written by Congress, claimed it was unconstitutional. In 232 years, Terry, this has never happened.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: In 232 years, never before have prisoners of war caught on the battlefield been treated as common United States criminals, citizens, with access and rights to our Constitution. It’s never, ever, happened. So what we have here, we have an activist liberal judiciary which is intent on destroying George W. Bush, and at the same time weakening the United States of America because in their minds, their own personal policy preferences, in their minds, America is guilty, we shouldn’t have been in Iraq. Any of these prisoners we’ve captured are unjustly and unfairly captured. This is the way the left seeks to address their grievance by punishing the whole country. People say for years, ‘Supreme Court nominations are important,’ and they count, and they do.
CALLER: Well, I tell you, if Senator McCain does not speak out on this atrocity…
RUSH: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait. We discussed this. Are you aware that Senator McCain thinks Club Gitmo ought to be closed?
CALLER: Well, I did hear that, but has he said anything on this specific issue yet with the Supreme Court decision?
RUSH: I don’t know. I don’t think he has. I haven’t seen it if he has, but he’s gotta support this. This is effectively going to close Club Gitmo. It’s going to close it.
CALLER: Nothing will close you down. (giggles)
RUSH: Well, they’re trying that, too. They’re trying backdoor ways on the Fairness Doctrine right now.
CALLER: I know.
CALLER: The disintegration of —
RUSH: These are people who must punish people who disagree with them; who have not committed any crime, just disagree. Have you heard the Democrats in Congress want to deny the military the opportunity to do press conferences?
CALLER: No, I had not heard that.
RUSH: That’s coming up in mere moments on the program. You know why? They say it’s propaganda. They say the military doing press conferences is propaganda! And of course it’s not propaganda. The military is trying to get their side of things out against an onslaught of lies and BS from the media and the Democrat Party. Petraeus was not lying, he was not propagandizing when he appeared before these congressional and Senate committees. No, all we have here is the Democrats are doing everything they can to silence people they disagree with.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: And so they want to silence the military because they can’t defeat the military. The news out of Iraq is very good. They don’t want that news out. Their buddies in the Drive-By Media are not reporting it. If the military does press conferences and sends out press releases to report it, then it looks bad for the Democrats. They’re trying to shut down the military. And the premise, the military is not political. They shouldn’t be making statements because it’s propaganda. Now, propaganda, the way the Democrats mean it, is: You can’t lie. The Democrats suggest that the military is lying! That’s what they’re saying, and therefore they’re not allowed to lie. Well, who’s calling them liars? Who are the liars about Iraq? Who are the liars about all of this? The Democrats! Who are the ones who wanted defeat? Who are the ones that tried to secure defeat? Who are the ones that were angering military families like you all over the country by suggesting our troops are rapists, murderers, and that we were killers and that we had no compassion, and that we had no ability to win, and they were waving the white flag of surrender? Who was it who was lying? It was the Democrats and the American leftists.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: And so the news has turned positive. That’s the biggest threat in the world to the Democrats. That can’t happen. So shut up the one place where the story can be told: the military. Then shut up the second place where the story can be repeated: sympathetic media such as talk radio. The Stalinist-like mentality and the tactics that the Democrats are employing here, classic illustration: You can’t beat ’em, so shut ’em up. You criminalize what your opponents say, and then you deem it unfit to be said.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: That’s where we’re headed here, because they can’t win the debates in the arena of ideas.
CALLER: All I can say for people out there listening is, I’ve seen this go on. Like I say since my son was over there, continuously, and if you want to know the truth of what’s happening in Iraq, you talk to a soldier that’s been there and not to the political leftists or liberals or whatever, or the mainstream media, because you will not hear there.
RUSH: But see, that’s my point. I understand what you’re saying, and you’re absolutely right. The Democrats are trying to shut that down. The military can’t be trusted, they say. The military is propagandizing. The military is lying — and Pelosi says they’re not going to be allowed to lie anymore while she’s speaker.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is Scott in Jackson, Mississippi. Great to have you here, sir. Welcome.
CALLER: Mr. Limbaugh, thank you so very much for this opportunity and for your service to our nation, and especially to our Constitution. I think this decision by the Supreme Court goes directly to the whole concept of the rule of law. It’s absolutely in conflict with the Geneva Convention and other treaties that we in good faith as a nation have entered into over the years. It’s definitely in conflict with the Constitution. I wanted to give you a unique perspective. I’m a service member who served in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2002. That was before the liberation of Iraq but after, obviously, we liberated Afghanistan. And, you know, for military pay purposes, sir, you know, there are certain benefits and allowances — and also military ribbons, service ribbons and awards — that are associated with overseas service, and those things are coded by service members. You know, it’s ingrained into your system that it’s important for you to get ribbons and awards and things to identify yourself as someone who served your nation, you know, respectfully. And we were told for pay purposes that it’s considered continental US, that’s CONUS is the acronym that the military uses. OCONUS is outside continental US. And I just thought it just seemed that the government was just in order to serve a purpose to save a couple of bucks for the service members serving down there, we weren’t given the benefits of overseas duty, and yet those same detainees we were guarding were considered overseas.
RUSH: Wait a minute. Hang on just a second, Scott, because I consulted a legal authority this morning about this, and indeed, Guantanamo, we lease from Cuba. They own it. We lease it. It is outside the continental United States.
CALLER: Yes, sir, it is.
RUSH: It is considered overseas.
CALLER: You have to cross a body of water to get there.
RUSH: Right. Now, the reason that this is important also because Supreme Court has a precedent, there is a previous case in which they said they have no jurisdiction in prisoners held overseas,. They have no jurisdiction. This is overseas. So they have contradicted, they’ve ignored — or overturned, I don’t know which — their own precedent on this. So you were denied OCONUS pay, is that what you’re saying?
CALLER: Yes, sir. OCONUS pay benefits, we were denied that, and you’re right, the commander of the facility greeted us when we hit the ground there, and he said that our lease agreement is that we pay $2,000 a year to the government and that we have to at least fuel one seaworthy vessel there to maintain the terms of the lease, and that’s what they do, and that’s part of the history of Guantanamo Bay. And it’s considered outside of the US, as far as anyone else is concerned, but when they pay us, it’s not. And that’s an overall issue that the Supreme Court stumbled into. You know, the government, when they’re serving an agenda and not the rule of law, inevitably contradicts itself because the agenda is a shifting target. It moves, but the rule of law is what we were founded on as a nation, sir, and it doesn’t shift, and that’s the whole point that I see.
RUSH: Wait a minute. This is getting interesting. Are you saying that the designation of service at Guantanamo Bay by the military as continental United States might have been done on purpose to way down the road facilitate such a decision from the Supreme Court?
CALLER: No, I don’t think they anticipated that. But in the moment, it served the purpose of saving them certain allowances and pay benefits that are associated with overseas duty for such a large force that’s being sustained down there.
RUSH: No, no.
CALLER: They were trying to save a buck.
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I understand that. My mind is wandering here. See, I put nothing past the left. And I know that the left is all over the CIA and the left is all over the State Department. The left is all over the Pentagon. All the war plans for Iraq were leaked; all kinds of damaging things were leaked by members of the Bush administration, the United States government. I know a stretch to think that maybe this designation of continental United States, CONUS, was done strategically so as to help liberals who are going to fight this. Because, look, the opposition to this war, Scott, has been better organized than the prosecution of the war was, at first. Well, ah, the original mission was fine. In the aftermath, the left lined up. This is, like I say, Levin wrote his book in 2005, published in 2005. He wrote it before that. He saw this coming, the attempt to transfer the power to fight wars to the judiciary from the chief executive. This has been an objective that the left has had. It’s based on a bunch of reasons. They hate Bush, B, they hate the military, they don’t trust it. They’re only comfortable with it when they control it and to get it in the hands of their judges, which they’ve done. I mean, how can you deny that this has happened? Command decisions are now being made by the US Supreme Court and lesser courts! This has never happened in 232 years, never happened in this exact circumstance, where prisoners captured overseas — key — the Supreme Court has said we don’t have jurisdiction there. They asserted it in this decision.