Posted by
flagwaver on Thursday, June 11, 2009 8:13:03 AM
When the SCOTUS handed down the ruling in Boumediene v. Bush that granted habeas corpus rights to foreign fighters captured on foreign soil and kept at the Guantanamo Bay naval base the fear was that once habeas rights were granted to those guys all sorts of constitutional protections would suddenly be applied to them. And when the DC Court of Appeals used the Boumediene decision to justify the granting of habeas rights to detainees at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan we thought we had seen the culmination of a bad, politically motivated decision as it was being applied to people captured in battle against out troops. These are not members of any recognized armed force and they are not Americans captured by American LEO's on American soil; they are terrorist fighters waging war against the United States.
But the one thing many of us feared and brought up has come to pass. I heard it mentioned by others and in one of my poli-sci classes I mentioned it as a possibility, and we were all roundly criticized for bringing up the idea. It was not a possibility, it was just a scare tactic, and the government would never do it...or so we were told. But with the compliance of what Rush Limbaugh aptly describes as 'the state-run media', the Obama DOJ has started reading Miranda Rights to detainees picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan. That's right folks, Obama and Holder have turned a war zone into an episode of Law & Order, with soldiers or on scene FBI agents getting a captured terrorist disarmed and saying "You have the right to remain silent, you have a right to an attorney and if you cannot afford an attorney thee state will provide one for you."
When the Obama administration decided that the words 'war' and 'terrorist' were no longer part of the national security lexicon we were afraid of the return of a pre-9/11 mindset where we dealt with terrorism after the fact, and as a law enforcement matter. We have now seen a total abandonment of the war fighting mentality in this administration and it has been replaced with an attitude that slapping the cuffs on the perps is going to solve the problem of terrorists. It is amazing, and shocking how little coverage this is getting in the MSM...but not surprising. They are totally in the tank for Obama as we all know, yet this story deserves some serious reportage to find out what this means for the nation. Yet we can just about rest assured that NBC, CBS, CNN, and ABC will not do that work because it may just cause the Chosen One some difficulty with his perception as a wartime leader and wise halfblood prince. And we cannot have that, can we? Obama must be propped up at all costs, so don't expect him to take any heat for this horrible policy.
In the aforementioned poli-sci class, I was asked what my policy would be if I were in charge of the war in Afghanistan and the situation with Gitmo. After saying that I would rescind the executive order to close Gitmo as a detainee camp, take time to figure out where the detainees should go, and find a way to repatriate many of the detainees I was asked what to do about any new people captured. And in essence I gave them a solution that BrianR advocated here for the longest time in dealing with terrorists.
One twelve cent bullet.