SCOTUS: Teaching terrorists to be non-violent is a crime

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Given the lack of ink on the subject, you may have been unaware that the Supreme court has just ruled against nonviolence, free speech, global equality, and common sense in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project [2].  This suit was landmark in challenging the original 1996 anti-terrorist law [3] (and the PATRIOT Act [4]) prohibition of material support to terrorist agencies. 

On the surface, this may be a no-brainer – of course it is a crime to contribute to murder and terror.  But this case was not about providing actual material support to terrorist actions, but rather about whether it is criminal to provide terrorist groups with lawful information to help them resolve disputes in a legal manner.  In other words, training would-be violent offenders how to navigate international law to pursue redress nonviolently has now become a crime.  Seriously. 

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “A foreign terrorist organization introduced to the structures of the international legal system might use the information to threaten, manipulate and disrupt. This possibility is real, not remote.” … “Training and advising a designated terrorist organization on how to take advantage of international entities might benefit that organization in a way that facilitates its terrorist activities,” he said.

Legal frameworks exist, by definition, as an open-source framework.  The entire foundation of common law that underlies the modern judicial system – as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [5] - is predicated on equal access to the law for all.  That the highest court in the land has just outlawed access to the court system (and by fiat, the entire international legal framework) is unfathomable on its surface.  But to undermine the only efforts at counterterrorism that have had any measurable success [6] is not only absurd, it is criminal,  stupid, and unabashedly immoral.

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