IMPORTING TERRORISTS TO AMERICA

Old news, but American leadership is still are kicking around in the sandbox with its inconclusive parsing of this vital national security issue.

NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE DIRECTOR Dennis Blair said recently that some of the 240 prisoners who are still being held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base may be released into the civilian population in the United States. This bizarre news of course has started a firestorm across the country as the talking heads rush to interpret the official statement.

In a spurt of twisted logic Associated Press reports, "that this would only take place in the case of prisoners who are “deemed non-threatening” and yet whose “home countries…won’t take them.”

That leaves us reeling. If they’re “non-threatening,” why won’t their home countries allow them to come back?

Understand this in plain language. These enemy combatants will be released into a neighborhood near you if they are in danger of being tortured should they be sent back home. So it's not enough that we have American patriots being accused of torturing these same detainees by the disturbing Leftist radicals now in power, but the thought of the detainees possibly being tortured by their own governments is just too horrible to contemplate. But hey, they've got an idea. Let's punish the Republicans and send these jihadists into our own cities...

Spectacular logic. That's truly thinking outside the box. Generating some real change we can fear. Predictably, Blair offered up the typical humanitarian meme, following the British model, saying that the released prisoners would even receive welfare benefits, wincing, “We can’t just put them out on the street.”

Of course not. Unless, apparently, it’s Main Street USA.

We're expected to believe that Americans won’t really be in any danger. After all, the only detainees dispatched in this manner surely will be the “non-threatening” ones. The US government, we are assured, is building dossiers on each of the prisoners at Guantanamo.” Well then, silly goose, chin up, smiles and confidence blessing our hearts, we can all rest easy in our little brackish backwaters. Move along. Nothing of real concern to see here.

After all, if the government is compiling dossiers, what on God's Little Acre could ever go wrong? Now, a week or so later, the new official position is that most of the GITMO detainees would merely be relocated to maximum security prisons in the US, not our cozy little neighborhoods. Better than Plan A, or at least, more nuanced, but we might ask ourselves one question. No possibility of trouble in that scenario either, eh Hoss...

A perfectly good state of the art prison camp is Guantanamo Bay. Simple solution, nimrods. Keep it open.

Ain't politics grand?

Meanwhile, on the local front, only this morning did the Two-Fisted Quorum receive notice that Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) has been vocal in the House and has also introduced legislation aimed at keeping the terrorists out of his state:

As you may recall from recent newsletters, I have been making the case that trained terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay must not be released in the US. Over the last two weeks, I have spoken on the House floor six times challenging Attorney General Eric Holder to answer my questions about any pending decision to release 17 ethnic Chinese Muslims known as Uyghurs, in our area.  We have information that these detainees were trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and believed to be members of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement. I also have written several times to the attorney general and to President Obama about my concerns.

I offered an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2009 emergency supplemental appropriations bill that would have restricted the administration from moving any detainees until October 1, 2009, require 60 days notification to Congress before any move, and require approval from affected states before releasing or transferring detainees.  Although my amendment was defeated in committee on a party-line vote, much of my proposed amendment was ultimately included in the spending bill.  It is my firm belief that Congress and the American people deserve all the facts before any detainees are released or transferred to the US.

Thanks Congressman! That's change we can live with...

SOWELL SPEAKS CLEARLY ON TECHNIQUE

Syndicated columnist and economist Thomas Sowell shakes a few limbs of current uproar in the US concerning the CIA-sponsored waterboarding of certain GITMO detainees.

We at the Two-Fisted Quorum support the logic and the common sense Mr. Sowell displays here. The shameful loose thinking and outright hypocrisy on the Left continues to stifle a united American front against our enemies foreign and domestic.

As the columnist points out, perhaps one day the evidence for a strong conservative defense will be as requisite for victory as it was at other historical turning points, gut right now, the bitterness that separates Americans who even bother weighing in on this conflict is rather disappointing.

THERE IS A BIG DIFFERENCE between being ponderous and being serious. It is scary when the President of the United States is not being serious about matters of life and death, saying that there are "other ways" of getting information from terrorists.

Maybe this is a step up from the previous talking point that "torture" had not gotten any important information out of terrorists. Only after this had been shown to be a flat-out lie did Barack Obama shift his rhetoric to the lame assertion that unspecified "other ways" could have been used.

For a man whose whole life has been based on style rather than substance, on rhetoric rather than reality, perhaps nothing better could have been expected. But that the media and the public would have become so mesmerized by the Obama cult that they could not see through this to think of their own survival, or that of this nation, is truly a chilling thought.

When we look back at history, it is amazing what foolish and even childish things people said and did on the eve of a catastrophe about to consume them. In 1938, with Hitler preparing to unleash a war in which tens of millions of men, women and children would be slaughtered, the play that was the biggest hit on the Paris stage was a play about French and German reconciliation, and a French pacifist that year dedicated his book to Adolf Hitler.

When historians of the future look back on our era, what will they think of our time? Our media too squeamish to call murderous and sadistic terrorists anything worse than "militants" or "insurgents"? Our president going abroad to denigrate the country that elected him, pandering to feckless allies and outright enemies, and literally bowing to a foreign tyrant ruling a country from which most of the 9/11 terrorists came?

It is easy to make talking points about how Churchill did not torture German prisoners, even while London was being bombed. There was a very good reason for that: They were ordinary prisoners of war who were covered by the Geneva Convention and who didn't know anything that would keep London from being bombed.

Read it all.

OBAMA'S CAPITULATION TO THE LEFT

Dear Gabriel,

The column below by John Yoo, which appeared last Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, analyzes some of the decisions President Obama made in his first week as commander-in-chief. Taken together, these decisions, as Yoo notes, "will seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks."

For instance, interrogators of terrorist suspects will be so restrained in their tactics that they won't even be able to use "good cop/bad cop" techniques commonly used by police officers. In other words, interrogation tactics which have been legally used on our own citizens are, in Obama's new world order of fighting terrorism, too extreme to be used on terrorist suspects.

This absurdity would be laughable if it weren't so dangerous.

For the past few years Democrats assailed President Bush's foreign policies, arguing that they made us "less safe." Whatever one thinks of those policies, one incontrovertible fact remains: No terrorist attack was successfully executed in America on the President's watch after 9/11.

According to intelligence experts one reason is the coercive interrogation techniques used to extract information from terrorist suspects and enemy combatants. With those now effectively jettisoned from our arsenal of self-defense, President Obama has put the nation at greater risk.

Essay by John Woo

During his first week as commander in chief, President Barack Obama ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay and terminated the CIA's special authority to interrogate terrorists.

While these actions will certainly please his base—gone are the cries of an "imperial presidency"—they will also seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks. In issuing these executive orders, Mr. Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001. He's also drying up the most valuable sources of intelligence on al Qaeda, which, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden, has come largely out of the tough interrogation of high-level operatives during the early years of the war.

The question Mr. Obama should have asked right after the inaugural parade was: What will happen after we capture the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah? Instead, he took action without a meeting of his full national security staff, and without a legal review of all the policy options available to meet the threats facing our country.

What such a review would have made clear is that the civilian law-enforcement system cannot prevent terrorist attacks. What is needed are the tools to gain vital intelligence, which is why, under President George W. Bush, the CIA could hold and interrogate high-value al Qaeda leaders. On the advice of his intelligence advisers, the president could have authorized coercive interrogation methods like those used by Israel and Great Britain in their antiterrorism campaigns. (He could even authorize waterboarding, which he did three times in the years after 9/11.)

Mr. Obama has also ordered that all military commission trials be stayed and that the case of Ali Saleh al-Marri, the only al Qaeda operative now held on U.S. soil, be reviewed. This seems a prelude to closing the military commissions down entirely and transferring the detainees' cases to U.S. civilian courts for prosecution under ordinary criminal law. Military commission trials have been used in most American wars, and their rules and procedures are designed around the need to protect intelligence sources and methods from revelation in open court.

It's also likely Mr. Obama will declare terrorists to be prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. The Bush administration classified terrorists—well supported by legal and historical precedent—like pirates, illegal combatants who do not fight on behalf of a nation and refuse to obey the laws of war.

The CIA must now conduct interrogations according to the rules of the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive techniques, threats and promises, and the good-cop bad-cop routines used in police stations throughout America. Mr. Obama has also ordered that al Qaeda leaders are to be protected from "outrages on personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" in accord with the Geneva Conventions. His new order amounts to requiring—on penalty of prosecution—that CIA interrogators be polite. Coercive measures are unwisely banned with no exceptions, regardless of the danger confronting the country.

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial.

The first thing any lawyer will do is tell his clients to shut up. The KSMs or Abu Zubaydahs of the future will respond to no verbal questioning or trickery—which is precisely why the Bush administration felt compelled to use more coercive measures in the first place. Our soldiers and agents in the field will have to run more risks as they must secure physical evidence at the point of capture and maintain a chain of custody that will stand up to the standards of a civilian court.

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us. If terrorists are now to be treated as ordinary criminals, their defense lawyers will insist that the government produce in open court all U.S. intelligence on their client along with the methods used by the CIA and NSA to get it. A defendant's constitutional right to demand the government's files often forces prosecutors to offer plea bargains to spies rather than risk disclosure of intelligence secrets.

Zacarias Moussaoui, the only member of the 9/11 cell arrested before the attack, turned his trial into a circus by making such demands. He was convicted after four years of pretrial wrangling only because he chose to plead guilty. Expect more of this, but with far more valuable intelligence at stake.

It is naive to say, as Mr. Obama did in his inaugural speech, that we can "reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." That high-flying rhetoric means that we must give al Qaeda—a hardened enemy committed to our destruction—the same rights as garden-variety criminals at the cost of losing critical intelligence about real, future threats.

Government policy choices are all about trade-offs, which cannot simply be wished away by rhetoric. Mr. Obama seems to have respected these realities in his hesitation to end the NSA's electronic surveillance programs, or to stop the use of predator drones to target individual al Qaeda leaders.

But in his decisions taken so precipitously just two days after the inauguration, Mr. Obama may have opened the door to further terrorist acts on U.S. soil by shattering some of the nation's most critical defenses.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting professor at Chapman Law School. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03 and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.