No way to run a war

"Over the past year, Vice President Cheney has waged an intense and largely unpublicized campaign to stop Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from imposing more restrictive rules on the handling of terrorist suspects, according to defense, state, intelligence and congressional officials."

- The Washington Post

So what? If you added the federal courts to his list, Cheney would be absolutely right.

If federal judges, congressmen and diplomats had tried to impose their own notions of waging war on F.D.R., World War II would still be going on.

Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court recently agreed to determine if the executive branch can try foreign terror suspects in military tribunals - or if they are prisoners of war who deserve access to our civilian courts.

Meanwhile, Congress is hell-bent on tying the president's hands with regard to the treatment of terrorists. While our troops are trying to protect us from evil, congressmen are more concerned with extracting no-torture promises from the president.

We are against torture - in this case, mostly because it's unreliable and unproductive. We don't much care about the terrorists' comfort levels.

Still, it's folly for bureaucrats and judges to try to micromanage 1) foreign policy and 2) war.

Even South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has helped broker a deal that would give terror suspects tried in military tribunals free appeals to U.S. civilian courts if they are sentenced to at least 10 years by the military court.

Why on earth? Why give any of them access to anything on American soil, much less the Constitution and Bill of Rights they would no doubt flush down the toilet if they could?

The U.S. Supreme Court already has ruled, amazingly, that terror suspects can challenge their detention in civilian court. The court will now rule in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni native and former driver for Osama bin Laden, whether the military tribunals are legal.

Let's hope the U.S. Supreme Court backs out of the war business. It has no business there.

Congress obviously has more business going there than the courts do, but lawmakers risk much - including our safety - by tying our president's hands.