The Constitution enumerates certain powers to the US government. Chief among them is national defense. Barack Obama, in his campaign and in his first two weeks as president, has demonstrated a callous disregard for that duty. His actions threaten to place Americans in grave danger.
Safe Since September 11, 2001
Like many, I assumed that Islamofascist terrorists would strike the US within a month or two of 9/11. The reasons were obvious at the time: we were woefully unprepared, panicked, and confused. But it didn’t happen. The ragheads missed their chance, much as the Japanese failed to parlay their decisive win at Pearl Harbor by attacking San Diego.
What’s more amazing, though, is that President Bush and our intelligence and military under his command managed to prevent an attack for the next seven plus years. That accomplishment is commendable and under appreciate by the American people.
One reason: the best minds of al Qaeda are in Guantanamo. But not for long.
Closing Guantanamo Guarantees They Walk
President Obama, who must have been well liked by his law professors at Harvard, seems to lack the most basic understanding of federal criminal procedure and rules of evidence. If tried in civilian courts, the terrorists currently in Gitmo will rightfully and certainly be released.
The terrorists at Gitmo were pursued, apprehended, interrogated, and imprisoned far outside our federal criminal rules. They are held and to be tried as enemy combatants under rules of military law, long established and oft approved by our courts. Once commenced under those laws, a case cannot transfer to civilian courts.
The Guantanamo terrorists were arrested without warrant. They were held without access to attorneys. They were interrogated with techniques prohibited to civil law enforcement. They are held on evidence obtained under rules of war and espionage, not under the 4th and 5th Amendments. They were likely not informed of their “rights” under the Miranda ruling.
In the eyes of any reasonable US civilian court, al Qaeda’ most vicious murders are victims of police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct of the highest order.
In the Hamdi Supreme Court decision, the majority opinion provides a massive relaxation of due process explicitly for military tribunals:
the exigencies of the circumstances may demand that, aside from these core elements, enemy combatant proceedings may be tailored to alleviate their uncommon potential to burden the Executive at a time of ongoing military conflict.
The opinion went on to say that hearsay may be admissible when other evidence is lacking. No civilian prosecutor would receive such leniency.
Harvey Silvergate (Reason), examining the Supreme Court’s Guantanamo decisions, emphasizes:
the Court’s flexible due process standard “would not be offended by a presumption in favor of the Government’s evidence, so long as that presumption remained a rebuttable one and fair opportunity for rebuttal [by the detainee] were provided.”
What Silvergate understandably omitted from his analysis was how these several cases would affect trials in US federal courts as opposed to military tribunals. At the time, no one considered transferring the detainees to the care of federal marshals a serious option. We no longer have that luxury.
Considering how far the Supreme Court went to erode the power of the tribunals, we can safely predict that the court will give federal judges no exemptions from common, statutory, or case law. That would mean most, if not all, of the detainees cum suspects would be released on grounds of lack of evidence.
A federal appeals court has already ruled that terrorists on American soil cannot be held as “enemy combatants” nor can they be tried by military tribunals. (Al-Marri v. Wright is pending before the Supreme Court.) Therefore, moving the men to the US proper would require full compliance with federal criminal procedure and rules of evidence unless Congress explicitly suspends habeas corpus. There’s a better chance of this Congress suspending the income tax.
If these excretions from Islam’s rectum are moved to the US for disposition under criminal law, they will walk within weeks of their first appearances in court.
Obama an Accessory After the Fact
For the President of the United States to give Khalid Sheik Mohammed de facto citizenship and the rights inherent therein is tantamount to making Barack Obama an accessory to terrorism after the fact. As former Vice President Cheney put it, much to the misguided dismay of Allahpundit:
If you turn ’em loose and they go kill more Americans, who’s responsible for that?
The answer, of course, is Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States.
How Shall We try Barack?
Since President Obama has already signed an Executive Order requiring the closing of Guantanamo and the transfer of its prisoners to US federal court jurisdiction, we can assume that a) they will be transferred, b) they will be released, and c) they will use the valuable information they learned about our sources and methods against us in a deadly attack. After all, just tonight we learned that, thanks to Obama, the slime responsible for the attack on USS COLE will walk free.
Moreover, Andrew McCarthy reports that sources in the White House are saying the President will dismiss all charges against all Gitmo detainees on Friday, February 7 (h/t Michelle Malkin).
the president was prepared to announce the dismissal of all the commission cases — i.e., not only against Nashiri but against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters.
Obama’s personal jihad on America has begun. Meet its first American victim, 16-year-old Susan Elbaneh.
When those things come to pass, any reasonable human being will understand that Barack Obama did as much to assist them as Good German did to enable Hitler. What then? How do get justice from Obama? And would we have any claim to justice?
After all, we elected him. We elected a man woefully unfit for the office of the president. We elected a Marxist amateur to the highest office in the world. We elected a man who told us that he would free our enemies. He repeated his promise for years.
The answer, of course, is that we won’t. Conservatives, being patriots, will rally behind the president, however culpable he may be. Liberals, being anti-patriotic, will rally behind Obama, claiming that al Qaeda was not responsible for whatever horror is to come, but that George W. Bush and rogue CIA agents staged the terrorism to make Obama look bad. The morons in the press will give credence to these idiotic lies, and many Hamletesque, “independent” nitwits will refuse to disbelieve the nonsense.
G. K. Chesterton said (paraphrasing) that the great danger one faces when he stops believing in God is not that he will believe in nothing, but that he will believe in anything.
Barack Obama is anything. Nothing would not be so dangerous.
Hennessy's View 
Use a grammer checker man, your writing style is very sloppy.
Sorry. It was late, and the checker in Live Writer doesn’t catch missing words. Thanks for reading closely.
By the way, enclose a direct address between commas; it is parenthetical. And it’s “grammar,” not “grammer.” And some stylists might prefer “grammar-checker” to “grammar checker,” but that’s a matter of style as much as it is grammar. And your entire comment is a comma-splice.
Come to think of it, you made committed more errors in 11 words than I did in 800. But thanks for keeping me on my toes. Really.
Oh, and avoid starting a sentence with a conjunction. 😉
Since Obama’s earnest drive to convince the nation to weaken its economic strength through redistribution as well as weaken its national defense, has confirmed the very threats to our Republic’s survival that the Constitution was designed to avert, it no longer is sustainable for the United States Supreme Court and Military Joint Chiefs to refrain from exercising WHAT IS THEIR ABSOLUTE CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY TO DEFEND THE NATION FROM UNLAWFUL USURPATION. The questions of Obama’s Kenyan birth and his father’s Kenyan/British citizenship (admitted on his own website) have been conflated by his sustained unwillingnes to supply his long form birth certificate now under seal, and compounded by his internet posting of a discredited “after-the-fact” short form ‘certificate’. In the absence of these issues being acknowledged and addessed, IT IS MANIFEST THAT OBAMA REMAINS INELIGIBLE TO BE PRESIDENT UNDER ARTICLE 2 OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION. Being a 14th Amendment “citizen” is not sufficient. A “President” MUST BE an Article 2 “natural born citizen” AS DEFINED BY THE FRAMERS’ INTENT.
Don’t say this to the liberals. They think Gitmo is one huge torture chamber and the fact that we’re keeping them there is somehow “illegal.”
Who is this idiot. Sir I am a so-called liberal that you have decieded to call un-patriotic.
I almost gave my life for this country in Vietnam.
Were you ever in a war Mr Hennessey?
Who do you think you are sir?
It is people like you who can do nothing but spread the politics of fear. Just like all of your right wing hero’s
What a joke you are.
People like you do not deserve to live in the USA
You evel bastard
Mr. Whipple,
My parents are married and were at the time of my conception. And it’s “evil,” not “evel,” unless you’re referring to the motorcycle stunt man. In that case, the first letter is capitalized, as it’s a proper name.
I’m sure The One will do his level best to remove me from the country, along with everyone else who disagrees with him. Which reminds me: which side were you on in Vietnam?
Cordially,
Bill Hennessy
I realize that my last comment might seem disrespectfully flippant. I actually meant it in complete seriousness.
I’m assuming that your weapon was pointed north in Vietnam. I thank you. I was little then, but I benefited from your sacrifice.
But if you voted for Barack Obama, you’ve switched sides. You voted for Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung and Josef Stalin. You voted for the guys you shot at. Then and now, they were on the wrong side of freedom, of goodness, and of history. (Although, I’m beginning to wonder if James Burnham might have been right about the history part.)
I am sure you are proud of your service in Vietnam. I wish you’d really think about what Obama and modern liberalism stand for. They stand for silencing their enemies, for stealing my things and giving them to their friends, for denying my children a church to attend. They stand for the tactics you, no doubt, witnessed–the way the VC “influenced” villagers in the South. That’s what Obama is–a communist. He may not have Che’s panache, but his thirst for elimination of opposition is just as powerful.
The battles you fought in Southeast Asia haven’t ended–they’ve just changed coordinates.
It’s a fact that Bush also released GITMO inmates that have rejoined the Taliban and killed more people. Being Conservative does not make a person more or less patriotic than non-conservatives. Your statements like this offend non-conservative while pander to conservatives who then feel justified in bashing Fellow Americans with a different ideology.