Diana West brings Frank an alarming perspective on Iranian influence in Iraq. Former presidential speech writer, Marc Thiessen, discusses water boarding and the State of the Union address. How prepared are we for the next biological attack and how soon is it coming? Senator Jim Talent of the Congressionally chartered Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation reports to you. All this and more on Secure Freedom Radio.
MONOLOGUE JANUARY 29, 2010
Welcome back. Well before the break we were talking with Mark Thiessen about some of the decisions that Eric Holder has made that have made America less safe, potentially putting many Americans at risk. One of those decisions that has certainly come a cropper it seems, is a decision that our friend Debra Burlingame, the sister of “Chick” Burlingame whose plane was commandeered and flown in the Pentagon on 9/11, described the decision that Eric Holder made, along with it appears President Obama, to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the man whom we were talking about with Mark about who had been water-boarded and confessed to so many aspects of terror against the country) to trial in NYC. And on the date that he was announced to be tried in NYC, Debra had this to say on Bill O’Reilly’s the O’Reilly Factor:
DEBRA BURLINGAME: “I think it’s a travesty. I think this is a dark day for the memory of my brother, his crew, the passengers and all those who died on 9/11. These men who President Obama and Eric Holder plan to bring to New York are getting the full force protection of the US Constitution –they are getting the same rights as American citizens, and make no mistake Bill, this is going to affect the evidence in the trial.”
The background noise of course was from footage taken the day nearly three thousand Americans were killed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his operatives. Yesterday, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee of the United States Senate, had the following to say to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC:
DIANNE FEINSTEIN: “KSM does not have to be tried in New York City, and if there’s any evidence that this is going to make New York City a target or present unusual expenses, and the Mayor—and I’ve been a Mayor—should be listened to. And what he has said is, yes it will; and what we’re asking you Mr. President, is to take this trial somewhere else.”
Dianne Feinstein, calling for the decision of Attorney General Eric Holder to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City to be reversed, for this trial to be held someplace else. This is just the latest, of course, in a series of pronouncements by elected officials, by Mayor Bloomberg (as Dianne Feinstein suggested), by the New York Police Department Commissioner Ray Kelly (who estimated that it would indeed cost extraordinary amounts – $1 billion by his estimate, over for years—for what? To secure Lower Manhattan, to turn it into an armed camp, so that neither the people who live there nor the people who work there can come and go, but hopefully neither will terrorists perhaps seeking to free or simply make a display of solidarity with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed won’t be able to either)—but all of this for what, for what?
Well it turns out now that even Congressman Jerry Nadler, one of the prime champions of this crazy idea, even his constituents have revolted. The President has directed Attorney General Holder to find some other sites—now that’s not quite the same thing just yet as actually cashiering the idea, let alone doing what needs to be done: which is cashiering Eric Holder himself. If this man had a shred of self-respect, he would have resigned by now, because this particular decision is only one of many that the Holder Justice Department has engaged in that are profoundly problematic.
We’ve talked about some of them with Mark Thiessen, the failure to stand up the investigative interrogation team that might’ve been able to get a great deal more intelligence out of this fellow Abdulmutallab (had Eric Holder decided not to give him the opportunity to give him his so-called Miranda rights and a lawyer, who hold him not to cooperate).
We’ve been witnessing efforts and decisions on the part of the Holder Justice Department to prosecute, as Mark said— those who have been doing the interrogation for us and the lawyers who gave them the authority in good faith to do the interrogations that saved American lives.
We’ve seen Eric Holder signaling to the trans-nationalists that he is prepared to facilitate the prosecution overseas of some of these individuals, perhaps with the help of INTERPOL, the international police organization that I’m sure with the support of the Holder Justice Department the President decided to give blanket immunity to the other day, setting the stage perhaps for renditions of the some of those officials who in the past have gone to such heroic lengths to protect us, rending them to some foreign justice with impunity because under the Obama-Holder program we will not be able to hold INTERPOL accountable.
Then there’s the whole problem of the rights of the detainees: I’ve mentioned Abdulmutallab being given them but so would Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—or indeed any of these terrorists who tried to destroy our country and its Constitution, and yet are now being imbued with these very rights for which they have nothing but contempt and thereby being given an opportunity perhaps to get off scot free despite what they have done to us or tried to. Then there’s quite recently the decision of the Holder Justice Department to give to the ACLU the names of the detainees the United States is holding at Bagram. This is, you can bet, a precursor to giving them constitutional rights, even though they’re not in this country—enabling them to perhaps to lawyer up; and maybe to escape justice!
And then as we talked about with Congressman Frank Wolf last week in a different vein, but no less troubling— the Eric Holder Justice Department has engaged in the obstruction of justice by giving Black Panthers (who it had engaged on video in election tampering in the Presidential election on behalf of Barack Obama’s candidacy in a racist and quite well… frightening way with nightsticks and intimidation trying to prevent people from voting or trying to influence how they voted when they went into the ballot box.
This is the kind of thing that bespeaks a man simply unfit for the job of Attorney General for the United States, a man who should’ve been disqualified from most of the decisions that I’ve just described, by the fact his law firm was representing the detainees before he came to office. To say nothing of the fact that a number of his senior appointees in political positions in the Justice Department were themselves lawyers for the detainees!
Is there any wonder that we have the kinds of decisions that have been made under this Administration, under this Attorney General, that we have?
I think it’s not only something that was predictable at the time, our friend Andy McCarthy who has done the most fabulous job of anybody I know in keeping book on these decisions, Andy McCarthy (our colleague at National Review Online, a regular contributor at Secure Freedom Radio) warned about this when Eric Holder was nominated! He has been vindicated. And it’s time now if Eric Holder, having now it appears been repudiated by the President for one of his more infamous decisions involving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York, does not have the self-respect to resign his office, he should be fired!
And I call on members of Congress, the media, and the public at large, to join us here at Secure Freedom Radio in calling for an end of the miscarriages of justice that have been perpetrated by this Attorney General and the beginning of a new day in which we fight this war on terror as though the protection of Americans’ lives is the priority of the government, not the protection of putative rights of our enemies.
Well that’s what I think. Let me know what your thoughts are. Securefreedomradio.com is one way to do it, the Frank Gaffney twitter and facebook accounts are another. You’re in the War of Ideas whether you like it or not, we’d like to know which side you’re on.
