Imprison here, release here
If Guantanamo Bay is closed, scores of trained jihadists, committed to killing Americans, will be released to dwell among us: It is that simple.
Pres. Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder contend that America’s civilian federal prisons are secure. Our "supermaxes," they insist, are up to the task of confining the most lethal terrorists. Even if that were true (and history shows it is not), the argument is the most hollow of strawmen. These terrorists are not going to escape – they are going to walk right out the prison gates. They are going to be freed by a perverse new legal system, an ad hoc creation of progressive federal judges, assisted mightily by an Obama Justice Department rife with lawyers whose former firms and institutions spent the last eight years representing America’s enemies.
The civilian criminal-justice system is neither designed for nor capable of handling wartime detention cases. The basic presumptions of the civilian system – innocence, privacy, the preference that the prosecution lose any case in which there is the slightest doubt about guilt – have no bearing on the detention of enemy operatives in wartime. Yet, international terrorists present challenges that traditional enemy combatants do not: They do not wear uniforms, they do not carry their weapons openly, they conduct their operations in secret, and they blend into the general population, intentionally creating ambiguity about whether they are combatants or civilians.
- Mr. President, Decertify the Iran Deal and Then Walk Away - October 5, 2017
- While Still a Senator, Kerry Communicated Obama’s Capitulation Policy to the Iranian Regime - August 12, 2015
- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s Prison Communiqués - January 17, 2014