PrintFebruary 3, 2010
President Obama, Meet Attorney General Holder
Either Eric Holder is acting in direct contravention of the wishes of his boss, or his boss was just making up nonsense when he was asked about how enemy combatants would be treated.
As Stephen Hayes reminds us in the Weekly Standard:
In an interview with 60 Minutes last spring, President Obama discussed the handling of captured terrorists and challenged those who claimed the "American system of justice was not up to the task of dealing with these terrorists."Obama said: "I fundamentally disagree with that. Now -- do these folks deserve Miranda rights? Do they deserve to be treated like a shoplifter -- down the block? Of course not." President Obama ought to call Attorney General Eric Holder. In a five-page letter to Senator Mitch McConnell, Holder lays out in exhaustive detail exactly why these folks deserve Miranda rights and why his Justice Department will treat them like a shoplifter down the block.
The "genius" of the Attorney General's approach is crystal clear in this statement Holder made to Kornbluth of the Washington Post:
"He (Holder) continued: "The criminal justice system has proven to be one of the most effective weapons available to our government for both incapacitating terrorists and collecting intelligence from them. Removing this highly effective weapon from our arsenal would be as foolish as taking our military and intelligence options off the table against al-Qaeda, and as dangerous."
Am I the only one who misses Don Rumsfeld's briefings on why the military objective is to kill terrorists?
