Filed under: Law, Military, National Security, Progressivism, Terrorism | Tags: Crime/Law Enforcement, Democrat Demagogues, Terrorism
Obama made a big deal during the campaign about Guantanamo. He thought he had an issue that would get him votes. On his second day in office, he signed an executive order that Guantanamo would be closed within a year. At the time, he had not visited Guantanamo, and I would venture, though I don’t know, that he has never met anyone who has visited Guantanamo. It was simply another bold step in his campaign to defeat George W. Bush for the Presidency.
The problem was that he had no idea what to do with the detainees. None. The “outrage” about Guantanamo comes from the detainees, who were trained to tell anyone they could that they were abused and the guards really, really mistreated them.
Osama bin Laden is many things, but he’s not a dummy. Even in the remote villages of Afghanistan, they know that the Americans are ever-so-sensitive to charges of abuse. Everyone who visits (except the radical lawyers representing detainees) comments on what a model prison it is, and the honorable treatment by the staff in spite of constant provocation. Treatment of detainees meets the standards of the Geneva Conventions, just as George W. Bush ordered long ago.
Under the new “Global Justice” Initiative, the FBI will now have a central role in global counter-terrorism operations. The FBI seemingly doesn’t have enough on their plate with ordinary federal crime and desperately trying to track down domestic terrorists and foil their plots. The role of the CIA and other intelligence agencies will diminish. I mean, who knows what the evil CIA has been up to?
FBI agents will expand their questioning of suspects and evidence-gathering to try to insure that criminal prosecutions are an option. Does no one realize that 9/11 was a failure of our reliance on the criminal justice system? And is it really a good idea for terrorists to have “the right to remain silent?”
The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. The Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to start giving Miranda warnings to captured alien combatant terrorists.
You’ve heard them hundreds of times on TV. “You have the right to remain silent…” They are doing this to insure that captured terrorists can be prosecuted in court. But this does not guarantee that they can be convicted, and if they are not convicted — what then? Are they released into the United States? Or if not, where? Back to the battlefield to kill American soldiers?
ABC News’ Jake Tapper asked about that. Will the Obama administration free Ahmed Ghailani (the first terrorist brought to the US to be tried) if he is found not guilty? He asked it several times in yesterday’s press conference, but Robert Gibbs said “he wasn’t going to get into hypotheticals about how something may or may not play out.”
This has to be embarrassing for President Obama. Candidate Obama and new President Obama scoffed at claims that he wanted foreign terrorists to get Miranda protection on capture. You can find him saying so on YouTube. The confusion about what are military matters and what are legal matters is forcing Obama into an awkward corner. He wants to be sure that he appears more, um, pristine than President Bush and Darth Vader who tortured everybody, you know. If he cannot continue to remind everyone of how evil BushCheneyRumsfeld were, then people might not hate Republicans enough to reelect him.
Minor matters like protecting the American people no longer seem so important. With Bush out of the picture, then there won’t be any more terrorism, for surely young Muslim men flocked to bin Laden training camps only because they were radicalized by all the torture Bush did, or something like that.
U.S. Representative Mike Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. He said “The problem is you take that guy at three in the morning off of a compound right outside of Kabul where he’s building bomb materials to kill US soldiers, and read him his rights by four, and the Red Cross is saying take the lawyer — you have now created quite a confusion amongst the FBI, the CIA and the United States military. And confusion is the last thing you want in a combat zone.”
The Democrats’ story has long been (once 9/11 began to fade) that there wasn’t really any danger from terrorism, it was just the Republicans trying to scare us. But they have never been much interested in consequences.
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