Posted on 06/22/2008 12:53:53 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
In an ABC interview on Monday, Sen. Barack Obama urged us to go back to the era of criminal-justice prosecution of terror suspects, citing the successful efforts to imprison those who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.
It was key to his attack on the Bush adminstration, which he charged, has "been willing to skirt basic protections that are in our Constitution . . . It is my firm belief that we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution. . .
"In previous terrorist attacks - for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated."
This is big - because that prosecution, and the ground rules for it, had more to do with our inability to avert 9/11 than any other single factor.
Because we treated the 1993 WTC bombing as simply a crime, our investigation was slow, sluggish and constrained by the need to acquire admissible evidence to convict the terrorists.
As a result, we didn't know that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were responsible for the attack until 1997 - too late for us to grab Osama when Sudan offered to send him to us in 1996. Clinton and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger turned down the offer, saying we had no grounds on which to hold him or to order his kidnapping or death.
Obama's embrace of the post-'93 approach shows a blindness to the key distinction that has kept us safe since 9/11 - the difference between prosecution and protection.
Pre-9/11, the priority was what it had always been - to identify the guilty, gather evidence to convict and punish them by imprisonment.
Post-9/11, the goal changed - now it's to identify and frustrate any and all pending terrorist attacks.
Should the effort to stop the attacks lead to arrests and provide enough admissible evidence to incarcerate or deport those responsible, fine. But gathering intelligence - not court-admissable evidence - lies at the core of the mission.
So when we found Jose Padilla - a terrorist planning to build a dirty bomb and explode it in a populated area - we couldn't prosecute him for his plans. We had the evidence, but it hadn't come to us in a form that made it admissible in a criminal court. So we prosecuted him on lesser charges of aiding terrorists by providing them with funds and supplies - something for which we had sufficient admissible evidence.
Would Obama require all our investigations to be conducted within the procedural framework needed to bring a criminal prosecution? That would slow our anti-terror efforts - fatally.
It has before. Following Obama's logic, Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy, Jamie Gorelick, ruled that evidence seized in an immigration prosecution couldn't be turned over to intelligence operatives investigating terrorism.
The "Gorelick Wall" barred anti-terror investigators from accessing the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, already in custody on an immigration violation.
He was taking flying lessons in Minneapolis at the time, so we wondered what he was up to. But we didn't look at his computer, and find the e-mail addresses and records of fund-transfers to each of the 9/11 hijackers - information that might well have prevented the attacks.
Our constitutional protections are wonderful and shouldn't be abridged on any account. But the protections in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments relate to prosecution under criminal law.
Intelligence that doesn't lead to prosecution isn't covered. But Obama would cover it anyway. He'd require us all to proceed in the way we had to in the halcyon days after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - procedures that led us to miss the point of what was going on, to fail to identify the real culprits until it was too late and left us unprepared for future attacks.
Any pics of Obama with Bill Ayers? That would be a perfect addition.
B. Hussein Obama is dangerous to this country’s future.
Obama in his own words from Audacity of Hope: “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.”
Does anyone really expect this Muslim militant to protect the USA?
The courts may have a small part to play, but the best way to deal with the threat, is to eliminate it. Are these chumps naturally stupid, or do they have to work at it?
And during the criminal-justice prosecution of those terror suspects, Lynn Stewart successfully passed info between the "Blind Imam" and his terror cells.
After she was convicted of aiding and abetting our enemies she got how many months in prison? Is there a rope shortage?
Feel safer now?
BHO may be qualified for some important government post like, oh, letter carrier for the postal service but there is NO WAY this dumb-@ss is qualified to be president - except to represent the people he is fronting for - you know, the ones who want to destroy America.
I agree with you 1000 percent.
Hussein is a 100% pure-bred Momma's boy; a geek who couldn't defend himself if his life depended upon it. And his top priority is to impress EuroTrash & VICK (Venezuela-Iran-China-Korea) with his effete, oh-so-noble fairness.
Sorry, you bitter Americans. Yer on your own...
Jimma Carter redux.
He wouldn't pass the security clearance.
The Obama antiterror strategy is to wait until terrorists kill American civilians, then arrest them and put them on trial. Of course, when we tried that in the 1990s, the eventual result was another attack on the World Trade Center. This one was far more successful, destroying the complex and multiplying the death toll nearly 500-fold.Oh, and the men who carried out the attack were never arrested and put on trial, because it was a suicide attack. Another failure of the Bush administration!
Please don’t insult letter carriers. I’ll grant you he might be qualified to clean up roadkill (with apologies to all roadkill cleaner-uppers!).
Jamie (Mr.Clinton, put up this wall) Gorelick and Eric Holder, two Clintonite justice department libs are prominent in the Obama campaign and will no doubt get appointments in his administration.
CALL OFF THE MILITARY DOGS! SEND IN THE NYPD. The FBI will back them up.
[Please don’t insult letter carriers. I’ll grant you he might be qualified to clean up roadkill (with apologies to all roadkill cleaner-uppers!).]
You’re right. I apologize to letter carriers everywhere.
Maybe he’d be qualified to swab out the mudslime foot baths at the University of Michigan’s Dearborn campus...
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