Wednesday, March 17, 2010 – Shoshana Bryen and Christine Brim

A riveting show today on Secure Freedom Radio.  Frank initiates the show with a monologue on Attorney General Eric Holder’s wrongheaded legal approach toward punishing terrorists.  JINSA’s Shoshana Bryen on the recent dispute between the Obama Administration and Israel, and what it means for you.  Plus, the Center for Security Policy’s own Christine Brim on the new CAIR Observatory website.

MONOLOGUE – March 17, 2010

We have had a window on what’s really wrong with the Eric Holder Department of Justice; Mr. Holder of course is the Attorney General of the United States at the moment. For some time now we have been discussing with Andy McCarthy the kinds of efforts that are being made by the Eric Holder Justice Department to move from the United States from a war-minded approach to terrorism, to a throwback to the pre-9/11 that’s all just you know, a criminal problem and the law enforcement agencies and the civilian courts (the Article 3 courts), we don’t need all this intelligence capabilities—we can prosecute the investigators, the interrogators and so on.

Well this issue was really brilliantly framed by John Culberson in the House of Representatives just yesterday in a hearing where Mr. Holder propounded the remarkable statement that were we to capture Osama Bin Laden, that he would be really just like say another mass-murderer, Charles Manson. But first he had this observation about whether we would likely capture Mr. Bin Laden:

ERIC HOLDER: “We’re talking about a hypothetical that will never happen. The reality is that we will be reading Miranda rights to the corpse of Osama Bin Laden. He will never appear in an American courtroom.”

So not that Mr. Holder wouldn’t want him to appear in an American courtroom, where we have seen Eric Holder say in the past, he would surely be convicted and then sent to be executed. So much for the impartial blind justice that he was promising for Khalid Sheikh Muhammad who he was insisting on bringing from Guantanamo Bay until very recently. But Representative Culberson pressed Eric Holder to go beyond the blanket dismissal of the hypothetical and what came out of this was really quite remarkable. The Attorney General opined as follows. Here’s John Culberson:

CULBERSON: “So therefore Osama Bin Laden in your opinion has the same rights as Charles Manson?”
HOLDER: “In some ways I think they are comparable people in some ways…”

In some ways, they’re both obviously psychopaths. But one is a common criminal who engaged in the murder of several people many years ago in a private home. The other is a man at war with this country, a man who is determined to try to destroy this country, a man who is operating by the way outside the laws of war in his effort to destroy this country. So Congressman Culberson pressed further and here’s another bit of the exchange between the two:

CULBERSON: “You said that terrorists have the same rights as Charles Manson, correct?”
HOLDER: “I’d said that murderers have the same rights as Charles Manson, and if these people are charged with murder in essence those are the kinds of rights they would get.”
CULBERSON: “And terrorists who have murdered U.S. citizens and approached your Department of Justice, they have the same rights as Charles Manson?
HOLDER: “In the sense that a murderer has the right to go before a jury, get the acts he’s charged with proved beyond a reasonable doubt, yes…”

So there you have it folks. The Attorney General of the United States declaring as directly as we’ve seen to date, it’s really all just one big criminal justice problem—and if only we pursue it as such, we confine our investigations to the Miranda-constrained arrangements, that we impute to these terrorists constitutional rights akin to those that American citizens enjoy, that heavens knows we don’t interrogate them in a way that might make them uncomfortable or in the absence of lawyers- especially Gitmo Bay-style lawyers who are only too eager to prosecute their government in the hope of springing these guys.

All of this now is on the table for all Americans to see, and I ask you: is this what you expect of your government whose constitutional responsibility to provide for the common defense? Is it your view, my fellow Americans, that you’re being adequately safeguarded by people who think hey this is just a sort of Charles Manson-kind of whackjob, and if we use the kind of tools we used to prosecute Charles Manson, hey, that’ll work.

I submit to you, it won’t work; and I submit to you thinking of this as anything other than a war is condemning us to losing it. And I, for one, won’t have that happen on my watch!

How about you? Let us know. Post here or on my Frank Gaffney facebook or twitter accounts.