Posted on 03/20/2010 4:26:00 AM PDT by Kaslin
Reality keeps intruding on Attorney General Eric Holder’s approach to terrorism.
During recent testimony before the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice and Science Subcommittee, Holder had a heated exchange with Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), over the rights of terrorists – specifically over whether a captured Osama bin Laden would need to be read his Miranda rights in accordance with the civilian prosecution model that Holder continues to advocate.
Holder’s response: “Let’s deal with reality…we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom…He will be killed by us, or he will be killed by his own people so he’s not captured by us. We know that.” End of story, according to Holder – no need to allow the question of civilian trials to get hung up on a remote hypothetical…except that a day later, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, stated that the goal of US forces remains to capture bin Laden alive, “something that is understood by everyone.” Almost everyone, anyway.
Reality struck again back when Holder declared – without consulting with local authorities – that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his associates, currently held in Guantanamo Bay, would be tried in civilian court in Manhattan. Public outcry followed, during which New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, and Members of Congress from both parties voiced strong opposition to the plan and urged Holder to reconsider. The White House is now apparently close to reversing Holder’s decision, one that was clearly disconnected from any understanding of the risks associated with trying KSM in the federal court system.
Remaining unplugged from reality, Holder continues to advocate for the cessation of terrorist detention operations at Guantanamo Bay, notwithstanding the fact that he toured the facility himself, declaring it “well-run”.
I also recently toured the detention facilities at Guantanamo. They are beyond “well-run” – seeing detention operations up close puts in stark relief the extent to which closing Gitmo would be not only entirely unnecessary, but even counterproductive.
Far from being the “gulag of our time”, as Amnesty International famously intoned, Guantanamo is a place where Joint Task Force personnel go to great lengths to provide for the health and welfare of the detainees. Detainees are provided up to 6,000 calories a day, with their choice of six hot meal options, including meat certified “halal” and brought in at taxpayer expense. They have 24/7 access to their own hospital, complete with X-Ray machines, Intensive Care Units, and 500 different brand-name medications.
The detainee library contains 13,000 books, and thousands of magazines and DVDs, in multiple languages – and every detainee is provided with daily copies of USA Today, Egyptian and Saudi newspapers, and two Korans. Detainees are offered classes in literacy (Arabic and Pashto), English instruction, art, and “life skills” such as resume writing. They are allowed to make phone calls every three months, with video setup, for at least one hour. They are also offered at least four hours of recreation a day, sometimes in groups, depending on the rules of the specific camp – I saw three camps that had outdoor soccer fields, plus several with aerobic exercise equipment, table tennis, and foosball. Even the maximum security Camp 5 allows compliant detainees three hours of TV a week, on top of their daily four hours of outdoor recreation time.
Guantanamo allows detainees to practice Islam, providing them with prayer rugs, prayer caps, prayer beads, Korans, and other religious materials. The recreation yard of Camp 5 (maximum security) has clearly drawn arrows in the cement, pointing towards Mecca. Group prayer is allowed in Camps 4 and 6 (where communal living is the norm). All detainees are allowed to observe religious holidays such as Ramadan, for which the detainee kitchen adjusts its own food prep schedule.
This is only a sampling of how detainees are treated at Guantanamo. Yet while this treatment may understandably prompt some to feel that the detainees have it too easy, and should be transferred to a “real prison”, closing down Gitmo detention operations would leave us less safe.
Gitmo is uniquely secure. As Admiral Tom Copeman, Commander of the Joint Task Force - Guantanamo, indicated during an interview, “it ain’t easy getting here.” The only people who can go down to Gitmo are those cleared as having business on the base – there is no “getting close” to it. You are either in Gitmo with proper clearance, or you are at least a three hour flight away in Florida, separated by hundreds of miles of ocean. There is no “uncontrolled land access” to the base, as Copeman put it.
Security precautions surrounding detention operations at Gitmo are tight, and down to a science, due to several years of practicing and perfecting these measures there. For example, journalists have photos they take in Guantanamo screened to ensure that sensitive security measures are not disclosed, and must be escorted at all times. Guards do not share their names or hometowns with detainees, cannot refer to each other by name when in the presence of detainees, and cannot be photographed above the shoulders without consent. Guards are not allowed to give an exact figure on the number of detainees currently in any given camp – they can only disclose a camp’s maximum capacity. While some might argue that these measures could eventually be learned and implemented elsewhere, it is unlikely to be an overnight process.
Even harder to transplant onto another location would be the requisite wartime mindset that characterizes detention operations at Guantanamo. As Admiral Copeman puts it, at Gitmo “war is being waged inside the wire”. The al Qaeda instruction manual has trained detainees to see confinement as another front in the war – Gitmo personnel are trained to see it the same way, and have been for the past eight years.
This is all to say nothing of the reality that once detainees touch ground inside the United States, their lawyers will argue that their physical presence here entitles them to a greater range of constitutional protections, in deference to previous Supreme Court rulings on such questions – an argument to which many judges will no doubt be receptive. Transferring detainees to foreign custody is also extremely risky – according to the Department of Defense, one out of five detainees released from Guantanamo have returned to terrorism.
The reality of Guantanamo is one with which Attorney General Holder has yet to come to terms. One has to wonder how much longer he and President Obama will remain disconnected from it just to keep an ill-conceived campaign pledge.
I’m still saying that Bin Laden has been pushing up Poppies for quite a while.
This bunch in the WH is doing more damage to the U.S. and her Constitution than the USSR, China, Cuba and any other communist dictatorship has.
Eric Holder is not qualified to be Attorney General. He has the law degree but not the competence required for such a position. In fact, we can say that about many of Obama’s administration officials. Obama himself is not intellectually qualified to be President. Why should it surprise us that he would select people even less qualified than himself?
Eric Holder is simply applying the Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” at the Federal level, from within the governing authority.
The objective is to UNDERMINE the standards that previously applied, by re-interpretation and judicious misapplication of existing law, without regard to the precedent that formed the basis of the law originally. Preserving the letter, but not the spirit.
Eric Holder is proof of the claim that affirmative action policies result in the hiring of less qualified personnel. I don’t believe Holder has the intellectual capacity to even understand the consequences of his policies. The guy is clearly a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
Me too.
I’m beginning to wonder whether the whole uproar over closing Gitmo wasn’t a distraction from the beginning, just a bone to throw to the moonbats and an obviously incompetent AG with clear conflicts of interest who can be appropriately jettisoned when the time is right. Stinks of Chicago.
Anyone with even an ounce of common sense can see that putting these people anywhere other than Gitmo would be a disaster (unless of course it was in a six foot hole).
Pres Clinton's Asst USAG, Eric Holder arranged for fugitive Marc Rich to bypass the Pardon Attorney and never told the US Attorney for SDNY that there was a pardon application in the air. Under the rules governing pardon petitions — rules that were approved by Mr. Holder’s office — the views of United States attorneys “are given considerable weight” because of the “valuable insights” they have.
And yet Mr. Holder did not consult Mary Jo White, the United States attorney in New York, and her colleagues about the Rich pardon petition; they did not know of it until it had been granted. NO ONE TOLD THEM ABOUT THE MARC RICH PARDON APPLICATION b/c if the pardon application had gone to the Office of Pardon Attorney like a normal pardon, the Pardon Attorney would have, as per written procedure, solicited the opinion of the US Attorney's Office which originated the case (something they wanted to avoid).
The people in the New York United States attorney’s office weren’t the only ones surprised by Mr. Holder’s decision. Deborah Smolover, his top deputy for pardon cases, did not find out about the Rich pardon until the White House called to inform her of it after midnight on Jan 20, 2001. (Rich's accomplice, Pincus Green, won a pardon, too.)
After the pardon was signed, Quinn has testified, Mr. Holder called him to commend him on “a very good job.” Mr. Holder also asked Mr. Quinn to consider hiring two former aides, one of whom had already contacted Mr. Quinn on Jan. 2 “at Holder’s suggestion.”
How Eric Holder came to OK the Marc Rich pardon. Holder "got a last-minute phone call" from the Clinton White House to vet Rich. Via the legal grapevine, the buzz was that Holder had deliberately hidden the pardon application from US Attorney's Office---So District of NY--- so they would not have an opportunity to protest. That's how far Holder's advocacy on behalf of Marc Rich actually went, when he was supposed to be working on behalf of the American people.
A NY Times OpEd piece reported an extraordinarily well researched history of the Holder involvement in trying to get extra special treatment for Marc Rich.
In 1999, Mr. Rich hired Jack Quinn, who had been Mr. Clinton’s White House counsel from 1995 to 1996, to help him advance his cause. The Rich team was still hoping to strike a deal with federal prosecutors in New York, who were in charge of the case.
An e-mail message to Mr. Rich from one of his New York lawyers said that Mr. Quinn felt “he could convince Eric that it made sense to listen to the professors and that he could convince Eric to encourage Mary Jo White, the United States attorney in New York, to do the same.” The “professors” were two tax experts paid more than $96,000 for a study based solely on statements provided them by the Rich legal team.
Asst AG Eric Holder reportedly told Rich's attoney Jack Quinn (who once worked for Clinton) that SDNY's position was ridiculous--an interesting comment coming from within the US Justice Department, to say the least. Mr. Holder told Mr. Quinn to write a letter to Ms. White with a copy to him, and promised to call her when it arrived.
Mr. Holder then called Ms. White personally and, after that conversation, told Mr. Quinn she “didn’t sound like her guard was up.” But New York stood firm. New York's position was consistent with the written guidelines on pardons which do not allow pardons for people while they remain fugitives.
On Nov. 18, 2000, Mr. Quinn told Mr. Holder that Mr. Rich was going to go for a pardon, a step his team had been contemplating for months. After the conversation, Mr. Quinn told colleagues that Mr. Holder had advised him to “go straight to” the White House and that the “timing is good.” Go directly to the White House? Bypass the DOJ Office of Pardon Attorney?
“The greatest danger lies with the lawyers,” Rich's attorney Mr. Quinn wrote in an e-mail message to an aide to Mr. Rich, referring to the prosecutors in New York. “I have worked them hard and I am hopeful that E. Holder will be helpful to us.”Well it turns out that the prosecutors in NY never got a chance to be a danger.
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WHO IS MARC RICH? Then a fugitive from justice, billionaire commodities trader Marc Rich was one of 140 people Bill Clinton pardoned during his last hours as president. Rich, 66, was charged in 1982 with the largest tax-evasion scheme in U.S. history, having evaded more than $48 million in income taxes. In 1983 Rich was indicted on 51 additional counts of racketeering and wire fraud. Rich's accomplice, Pincus Green won a pardon, too.
Rich also violated the US Trading with the Enemy Act by conducting business with Iran, even as US embassy staff were being held hostage. In 1983, Rich fled to Switzerland, never serving a day in jail. After fleeing the United States, Rich renounced his American citizenship, became an Israeli citizen and a major benefactor of Jewish charitable organizations, giving nearly $80 million to Israeli hospitals, museums, orchestras, and universities.
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