New Report Says Bring Back The Clinton “Paper Tiger” Years

Also, I am sick and tired of the bleeding herts crying about the poor treatment of the animals at Gitmo. They never had it so good. They are there because they were caught red handed and should have been executed. I, for one, don’t care what happens to them. They would kill usall in a minute if they could. The left is truly suicidal or stupid or both. They never think through any idea or decision they make. It sounds goodor feels good or it might fool the public, so let’s go for it. Their ideas are what paves the road to hell.

Pg 60 of Ronald Kessler’s Terrorist Watch:

In the case of Iyman Faris, the FBI’s surveillance led the bureau to discover the Brooklyn Bridge plot.

“Faris was someone who had gone overseas and reached out for al Qaeda,” Cummings says. You can imagine some idiot sitting up there straddling an eighteen-inch cable, with a cutting torch trying to cut the cable. He would have been tackled and probably beaten to death by New Yorkers before he got very far. But he was looking at a number of other things at the same time. The problem was, he was a research conduit for al Qaeda central, directly. So eventually he probably would have gotten to a point where they would have given him something useful. He also knew a lot of people.”

Before 9/11, Cummings says, “We would have indicted him, taken him to jail, and worked with his lawyers to see if he wants to cooperate. Absolutely. After 9/11? No way. We approach him, using smart agents with lots of experience to convince him that it’s in his best interest to work with us.”

Faris quickly agreed to cooperate.

“We worked him for over a month- worked him and worked him and then worked him some more, ” Cummings says. “We had the agency and military and everybody on board with us.”

Faris eventually pleaded guilty. On October 28, 2003, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Pg 52:

By the end of 2002, FBI Director Mueller could point to about a hundred terrorist attacks that had been thwarted by the U.S. government since 9/11, cinluding some intended to take place on U.S. soil

sending the terrorists to civilian courts did to help make this country safer during those wonderful Clinton years didn’t we?

How many Americans were killed by terrorists in the Clinton years? Slightly more than were killed by bees and hairdryer electrocutions, but fewer than were killed by falling out of bed (I am estimating).
More to the point, was someone set free by a civilian court who would have presumably been locked up by a military one? Or are you arguing purely for the deterrent value of military tribunals? I thought standard right-wing belief was that Islamic terrorists couldn’t be deterred (hence the need to keep Iran from getting nukes) since they followed a death-seeking religion.
Seems to me that the failures that led up to 9-11 were failures of intelligence, not failures of the criminal justice system. I don’t believe Mohammed Atta was tried and released by a civlian court, for example.

I am sick and tired of the bleeding herts crying about the poor treatment of the animals at Gitmo. They never had it so good. They are there because they were caught red handed and should have been executed.

If they were caught red-handed, then why not try them? As for the conditions at Gitmo, I grant that they are very good – but the issue is a lack of due process. Anyway, Gitmo is also tangential: I agree that the guys there should get military tribunals, not civilian trials, but in most cases they don’t get even that.

I, for one, don’t care what happens to them. They would kill us all in a minute if they could.

If you don’t care what happens to them, then I think you are operating based on a presumption of guilt and a belief in the infallibility of the process by which they were caught. Given that many of them have been released after being determined to not, in fact, be terrorist threats, I don’t think that’s reasonable. And I’m aware that some of those released were released in error (at least, they later fought against us) – but that just shows that the release process (like the apprehension process) is subject to human error.

When someone blows up your buildings, it’s different than robbing the local 7-11.

Sure. But different how? This is only the beginning of an argument. It’s a long way from ‘these crimes are not the same’ to ‘let’s set aside a couple hundred years of traditional jurisprudence’, and you haven’t filled in the blanks.

Ronald Kessler’s Terrorist Watch [..]

These is a good example of why you want to involve the intelligence services in a situation where someone is a terrorist threat, rather than just do arrest-and-trial. It could also be used to argue that you need to take a flexible, rather than legalistic, approach when dealing with terrorism. But in terms of arguing for military tribunals rather than civilian courts, I think this is evidence for civilian courts. Unless I’m misreading this, Faris was convicted in a civilian court. Military tribunal not needed.
Of course, it’s also true that the DoJ’s conviction rate for terrorism trials is very low (29% vs 93% for other crimes). But a low conviction rate is not necessarily an indication that terrorists are running free – it seems more likely that they are aggressively pursuing very marginal cases.

Terrorism is not, nor should it ever be, a civilian law enforcement issue.

If I trusted the government to actually restrict use of special terrorism prosecutions to serious matters, rather than gradually expand the scope of such Star Chamber proceedings, I would be more sympathetic. As it is I’m reminded of Brandeis: ‘The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.’.

Terrorists caught in foreign lands trying to kill our troops do not fall under our Constitution.

Technically you are correct. But exceptions made out of necessity or expedience in a time of war are a lot less appealing when continued years later, once possible intelligence rationale or resource limitations are no longer plausible. Just because we *can* legally justify detaining them indefinitely without trial doesn’t mean we should. If they were indeed caught trying to kill our troops then it shouldn’t be that hard to assemble the evidence.
I’m also a little at odds with the idea that we should only apply the protections of the Constitution to US citizens. If they reflect universal human rights, why not apply them to everyone (to the extent that it’s within our power to do so)? A lot of people seem to feel that the rights in the Constitution are privileges granted especially to Americans by their government despite being inconvenient for the government at times, and that by extension the US shouldn’t grant the same rights to foreigners. This is a little like the Roman view of citizenship, where citizens were legally privileged above others. But closer to the original view is the idea that these rights are granted by God to all people, and that the Constitution merely reflects our government’s obligation to safeguard them. For example, here’s Supreme Court justice David Davis:
‘The constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.’
Of course there are practical limitations – for example, I don’t think we could afford to give ten million illegals the whole nine yards of court, trial and appeal before deporting them. But it does bother me when people seem to be deliberately trying to find the lowest possible amount of human rights we can get away with allowing, rather than trying to live up to the higher ideals we’ve traditionally upheld.

Don’t presume to know what my feelings are in regard to these people.

Who is presuming anything? You yourself said you didn’t care what happened to them. I’m making what seem like logical assumptions about your other beliefs about them.

As I said before, they were caught red handed on the battlefield. And not just a few have returned to fight us but a great many.

In the case of those ‘caught red handed’, a trial seems like it would not pose much difficulty.
As for the returnees, the math looks sort of like this (numbers are from Wikipedia):
775 were sent to Gitmo
420 were released without being charged
36 later were confirmed or strongly suspected of having committed terrorist acts (whether this is ‘a great many’ is I guess in the eyes of the beholder).
Of the remaining 355 still there, we apparently plan to try less than one fourth and ultimately release the remainder.
So ultimately 90% of the detainees are going to be released without a trial. Of those released so far, it looks like 10% or so have taken up further terrorism and so you could say they were released in error. I don’t know what the recidivism rate for terrorists would be, but if it’s anything like the rate for regular criminals then most of those released were, indeed, not terrorists.

I’ll bet you wouldn’t be so sympathetic to them if you were one of their guards having offal thrown at you.

Probably not, I’m only human.

As I said they are animals and dangerous animals at that.

They’re human too, which is the tragedy.

It is people like you that wants them brought to the US for trial in the courts and probably released in the US for lack of “evidence”.

Actually, if you read my comments above you will see that I was OK with military tribunals for them. Though I wouldn’t be *opposed* to civilian courts either. As for evidence or as you put it ‘evidence’, what do you have against it? You want them held without evidence because of your belief that they’re animals?

You people are so fond of saying if we on the right are for the war why don’t we join the army.

I don’t recall making this kind of chickenhawk argument myself. I do think we’re much better off with Presidents who have military experience, but that’s a whole other discussion.

Well, my question to you is if you sympathize so much with them why don’t you invite them into your home and expose your family to them.

There are lots of people who I don’t want in my house who nonetheless don’t deserve to rot in jail. Some of these guys fall in that category.

One question makes the same sense as the other.

Which is to say, none? But since I didn’t ask the first question I’m not sure what you get from this line of argument.

The fact of the matter is that the countries these people belong to won’t take them back. So what is your solution as to what to do with them?

Some of them are stuck in limbo like that, maybe fifty or sixty. I don’t have a blanket recommendation for dealing with all of them. In some cases (where the home country has an acceptable human rights record) I don’t see why we couldn’t force the issue and say ‘here, this is your guy, deal with it’. If it’s someplace like Tajikistan then give the detainee the option of repatriation to an uncertain and probably unpleasant future, or indefinite stay at Gitmo. Just one possibility.

bbartlog wrote:

I’m also a little at odds with the idea that we should only apply the protections of the Constitution to US citizens.

Have you read the US Constitution lately? It specifically applies to us, the United States, not anyone else. Remember “We The People of the United States of America”?

bbartlog wrote:

As for the returnees, the math looks sort of like this (numbers are from Wikipedia):
775 were sent to Gitmo
420 were released without being charged
36 later were confirmed or strongly suspected of having committed terrorist acts (whether this is ‘a great many’ is I guess in the eyes of the beholder).
Of the remaining 355 still there, we apparently plan to try less than one fourth and ultimately release the remainder.

Not so much.

From CNN:

Of the more than 500 detainees released from Guantanamo since the detention camp was opened in 2002, 38 have been stripped of their “enemy combatant” status and determined to pose no future threat to the United States. The remaining 462 were repatriated to home countries or resettled to third-party countries and still considered a threat, Pentagon records show.

The Wiki numbers led you astray.

bbartlog wrote:

Some of them are stuck in limbo like that, maybe fifty or sixty. I don’t have a blanket recommendation for dealing with all of them. In some cases (where the home country has an acceptable human rights record) I don’t see why we couldn’t force the issue and say ‘here, this is your guy, deal with it’. If it’s someplace like Tajikistan then give the detainee the option of repatriation to an uncertain and probably unpleasant future, or indefinite stay at Gitmo. Just one possibility

Again from CNN:

The United States is still holding about 65 detainees scheduled to be released to their home governments. But before that can happen, the United States has to get assurances the detainees will not be persecuted or harmed when they arrive home, Pentagon officials have said.

“We have no desire to be the world’s jailer, which is why the 500 were allowed to depart,” Gordon said.

Seems that you should really have no beef with what we are currently doing in this regard then.

bbartlog wrote:

Just because we *can* legally justify detaining them indefinitely without trial doesn’t mean we should. If they were indeed caught trying to kill our troops then it shouldn’t be that hard to assemble the evidence.

Personally, I think that we should strictly follow and apply the Geneva Conventions to any and all persons caught fighting without uniforms.

If we had chosen to do that then we wouldn’t have needed Gitmo and probably could have wrapped this thing up a little sooner.

Actually they’re not too bad

The numbers are only 426 off in the “still a threat” category.

Whether this is ‘not too bad’ is I guess in the eyes of the beholder.