The current administration is making some horrendous errors in its misguided quest to treat the terrorist threat against us as a civil police matter. They are dead set on trying captured terrorists with no ties to the US and who committed acts of terror far from our country in US courts. This will imbue them with all the rights and privileges of US citizens and sets up scenarios where the ghost of Johnnie Cochran is floating around NY courtrooms intoning "If the suicide belt does not fit, you must acquit". The cognitive dissonance of this foolishness is painful to contemplate and it has led to some of the most convoluted maneuvering imaginable. Senators Lieberman and Ayotte ask some simple questions the Obama team has no good answers for. The United States has a first-rate, professionally run facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that is designed for terrorist detentions, interrogations and military trials. So why would a suspected Somali terrorist, captured half a world away, be held on a Navy ship for two months of interrogations and then brought to a New York federal court for trial? In our opinion, there is no good reason. Painfully true, but the answer is obvious, politics. The left hates Gitmo and Obama has used up tons of his cred by not closing it, so he will be damned if he'll use it even when it makes perfect sense to do so. Well damned he may well be, but for now they are doing their level best to create precedents that will handcuff our ability to deal with scum too evil to even deserve the title of criminal. Andy McCarthy points out an equally outrageous attempt to lawyer our counterterror operations up in the case of a Hezbollah leader responsible for the deaths of numerous Americans in Iraq. One of the greatest mistakes of the Bush team's tenure was the total failure to hold Iran accountable for the hundreds of US troops killed directly and indirectly by Iranian operatives. There should have been military responses to the acts of war and terrorism committed by the Iranians and President Bush stands responsible for that lack of will. Now Obama seems determined to lower the bar even further. An Iran-backed Hezbollah commander who killed American soldiers in cold blood has been in U.S. custody for four years. Most Americans would see this as a good thing. For the Obama administration, it is a vexing dilemma.... As Bill Roggio recounts at The Long War Journal, Daqduq partnered with Iran’s deadly special-operations unit, the Quds Force, to set up an intricate web of Shiite terror cells. Battalions of 20 to 60 recruits were brought to Iranian bases for schooling in close combat tactics, kidnapping, and intelligence collection, while also learning to use explosively formed penetrators, mortars, rockets, and sniper rifles. When their training was complete, they were loosed on Iraq. Fueled by Iranian supplies, they targeted and killed American and allied forces. Most notoriously, they carried out the January 2007 Karbala massacre, in which five American soldiers were killed, four of them as captives, handcuffed and shot before U.S. rescue teams could close in. Daqduq was captured by American forces two months later. He has been in the custody of our military in Iraq ever since. He is not a defendant. He is not a capo in some Iranian Cosa Nostra family. He is a terrorist enemy of the United States, who has committed atrocities against American soldiers during a war authorized by Congress. And yet the Obama team is not interested in using the military commissions, also specifically authorized by Congress and signed by Obama himself, to try Daqduq. They attempted to slide him over to the Iraqi government where the Shia factions who are tight with Iran would have been certain to release him. But news of that came out, and now they are stuck. We will soon lose our right to hold prisoners in Iraq and, so O is in a tough spot. He has to exercise some of that Commander in Chief authority to deal with an unlawful combatant caught on the battlefield during the prosecution of a war legally authorized by Congress. If they can find a rationale to try him in a civil court, they will have set a new standard for legal fiction. Terrorists are not common criminals and the sooner we get a President who understands this the better.
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Posted
Jul 25 2011, 12:33 AM
by
BLACKFIVE