Tuesday, February 9, 2010

To Have and to Holder

Quick now--who do you suppose is the bigger incompetent: Barack Obama, incompetent outreacher to genocidal mullahs and bower extraordinaire, or his flunky, the incompetent attorney general? After reading this (by Jennifer Rubin in the Weekly Standard) my money's on the flunky:
Attorney General Eric Holder has been the Obama administration’s point man in revising the nation’s approach to terrorism. Holder said last summer that it was his decision to reinvestigate CIA operatives who had employed enhanced interrogation techniques during the Bush administration, although these individuals had been cleared by the Justice Department’s career prosecutors. It was Holder’s call, the president said, to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in a New York courtroom rather than before a military tribunal. And Holder, in a letter this past week, took responsibility for the decision to mirandize the Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and classify him as an ordinary criminal defendant rather than an enemy combatant.

There is doubt whether Holder was acting independently in all these critical decisions, and whether the White House would not, at the very least, have weighed in. Either way, Holder has become the president’s Achilles’ heel, a lightning rod for critics and a headache for supporters.

Defending his KSM decision, Holder appeared ill-prepared in Senate testimony last November. A fumbling attorney general was stumped by Senator Lindsey Graham’s questions probing what other enemy combatant seized on foreign soil had been tried in federal court. The answer, after a painful pause, was supplied by Graham: There has never been one. Nor did Holder rule out mirandizing Osama bin Laden if he were captured...
"Osama bin Laden, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law..."--now that's just plain batty.

1 comment:

Jim R said...

"Osama bin Laden, you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law..."

But if you choose to remain silent, and are thereby judged innocent due to lack of evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, or because our Executive made prejudicial comments regarding your guilt and your likely trial verdict, you understand you cannot be set free.

You see, the same Executive that gave you full citizen's rights, then effectively took them away again by prejudice of your rights, in order to be an example to the world, must finally have to treat you as the dangerous foreign terrorist you are, and hold you indefinitely .....which is what that other authoritarian regime wanted to do in the first place, dammit!

But at least we saved your life, another very important principle to our regime's more civilized principles. Consider yourself lucky you got a visit from the drones on our soil, instead of the drones we send to yours...on a daily basis.