From her facebook page:
President Obama’s meeting with his top national security advisers does nothing to change the fact that his fundamental approach to terrorism is fatally flawed. We are at war with radical Islamic extremists and treating this threat as a law enforcement issue is dangerous for our nation’s security. That’s what happened in the 1990s and we saw the result on September 11, 2001. This is a war on terror not an “overseas contingency operation.” Acts of terrorism are just that, not “man caused disasters.” The system did not work. Abdulmutallab was a child of privilege radicalized and trained by organized jihadists, not an “isolated extremist” who traveled to a land of “crushing poverty.” He is an enemy of the United States, not just another criminal defendant.
It simply makes no sense to treat an al Qaeda-trained operative willing to die in the course of massacring hundreds of people as a common criminal. Reports indicate that Abdulmutallab stated there were many more like him in Yemen but that he stopped talking once he was read his Miranda rights. President Obama’s advisers lamely claim Abdulmutallab might be willing to agree to a plea bargain – pretty doubtful you can cut a deal with a suicide bomber. John Brennan, the President’s top counterterrorism adviser, bizarrely claimed “there are no downsides or upsides” to treating terrorists as enemy combatants. That is absurd. There is a very serious downside to treating them as criminals: terrorists invoke their “right” to remain silent and stop talking. Terrorists don’t tell us where they were trained, what they were trained in, who they were trained by, and who they were trained with. Giving foreign-born, foreign-trained terrorists the right to remain silent does nothing to keep Americans safe from terrorist threats. It only gives our enemies access to courtrooms where they can publicly grandstand, and to defense attorneys who can manipulate the legal process to gain access to classified information.
President Obama was right to change his policy and decide to send no more detainees to Yemen where they can be free to rejoin their war on America. Now he must back off his reckless plan to close Guantanamo, begin treating terrorists as wartime enemies not suspects alleged to have committed crimes, and recognize that the real nature of the terrorist threat requires a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor.
Well said, Governor. Da Wizzard of O is in way over his head.
ff, how can you state "well said"?
ReplyDeletethis from her essay;
This is a war on terror not an “overseas contingency operation.”
i have been coming to J/P for at least a couple of months now, and i have read your essays critical of the use of just such a term as that.
of course i can not reference the exact essay(s), but i do remember something to the effect of a comparison to WWII. i.e., this is no more a war on terror than WWII was a war on kamikaze attacks.
granted, a few sentences before the "war on terror" comment she does state that we are at war with radical islamists, but i think ff, should have pointed out the use of this "term" that he himself has been critical of.
Hi Louie,
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year!
As you know, I think the term 'war on terror' bites rocks. But in this case, she's comparing it to the Obama Administration's even sillier euphemism, an deverything else she's saying is pretty much spot on, so I'll chalk this up to a significant but curable semantic error on her part.
Regards,
Rob