It’s like deja vu all over again. The Obama administration is apparently seriously considering holding Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s trial in a new venue, since New York City is out.
That would be at Guantanamo Bay.
In front of a military tribunal.
The trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed won’t be held in lower Manhattan and could take place in a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, sources said last night.
Administration officials said that no final decision had been made but that officials of the Department of Justice and the White House were working feverishly to find a venue that would be less expensive and less of a security risk than New York City.
The back-to-the-future Gitmo option was reported yesterday by Fox News and was not disputed by White House officials.
Mind you, that is exactly the right thing to do. KSM had not business ever being in a civilian court with civilian rights. He conducted an illegal act of war against the United States. Barack Obama had absolutely no right to grant KSM the access to civilian courts in the first place.
But one has to ask:
How many heads are exploding on the left right now?
The prez channels a TV lawyer, his Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Incompetano assures us that the system works just great and our very own Nigerian terrorist is lawyered up, wrapped in the protection of American criminal law.
Meanwhile, in Denmark, the terrorists are wielding axes and knives at old men and little girls.
Danish media say Mr Westergaard was in his home in Aarhus with his wife and grandchild when a man broke in and threatened him with a hammer.
Mr Westergaard, 74, is said to have raised the alarm and police entered the house and shot the intruder.
Mr Westergaard’s cartoons were printed by Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005.
He mocked Muslim suicide bombers by depicting the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.
But the drawing triggered violent protests, with Danish embassies attacked by Muslims around the world and dozens killed in riots.
Mr Westergaard went into hiding amid threats to his life, but emerged last year saying he wanted to live as normal a life as possible. His house has been heavily fortified and is under close police protection.
Mr Westergaard told Jyllands-Posten that the man had entered his house by smashing a window with a hammer and had shouted in broken English that he wanted to kill him.
This is not a criminal matter. This is a war. The Somali and our own Nigerian attacker are not entitled to criminal law protections. They are illegal combatants – out of uniform and making direct, intentional war on civilians.
And we do not need a clueless chief executive and an clue-proof head of Homeland Security.
We need enemy combatants treated as such, not given legal rights they are not entitled to.
Mark Steyn:
And 13 men and women and an unborn baby are dead.
Well, like they say, it’s easy to be wise after the event. I’m not so sure. These days, it’s easier to be even more stupid after the event. “Apparently, he tried to contact al-Qaida,” mused MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “That’s not a crime to call up al-Qaida, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?” Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?
The truth is, we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said Gen. Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army chief of staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, “an acceptable level of violence.” Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out.
As Steyn Points out, the lessons of 9/11 are fading. Go read it all.
The lessons of Fort Hood are not even being learned. The murderous Dr. Hasan is being forgiven by the media for his heinous act, his brutal murders excused by the media elite. His personal jihad not even acknowledged, but given a brand-new, never heard of medical excuse. PTSD by proxy.
There has been one case after another dismissed by the media and the authorities who are supposed to keep America safe. At some point, something will give in this country. Instead of facing the fact that these are terrorist acts and denouncing them for what they are, the media and the authorities are virtually guaranteeing a backlash when the shoe really drops goes off.
The righteous indignation of an officer in the United States Army:
Even four hours after Hasan stood on a desk yelling Allahu Akbar! and opened fire, the FBI stated that they were not investigating the attack as an act of terrorism even as there were still reports of other gunmen on the loose. Meanwhile, the Army continues to dismiss it as a “tragedy” and an “isolated incident by a lone gunman” while the media has invented the psychological condition of post-traumatic stress disorder by proxy. There is more concern for promoting the appropriate information operation campaign and maintaining the illusion of safety than there is for actually exposing the weaknesses and faults in the system that allowed this to happen. We’re even being told that damage to the Army’s efforts at diversity would be a greater tragedy than the murder of the twelve soldiers — how ironic the week of Veterans’ Day.
The double standard is obvious further down Major Kellor’s piece. How long would an officer last in the Army if he was espousing white supremacist hate? Well, Hasan was espousing hate and acting erratically for a long, long time. Yet political correctness and rear-end covering trumped duty and loyalty to the men and women of the United States Army.
The officers who failed to protect their fellow soldiers are guilty of dereliction of duty. It won’t happen, of course, but it would be fitting to see the lot of them sacked.
Mark Steyn:
Thirteen dead and 28 wounded would be a bad day for the U.S. military in Afghanistan and a great victory for the Taliban. When it happens in Texas, in the heart of the biggest military base in the nation, at a processing center for soldiers either returning from or deploying to combat overseas, it is not merely a “tragedy” (as too many people called it) but a glimpse of a potentially fatal flaw at the heart of what we have called, since 9/11, the “war on terror.” Brave soldiers trained to hunt down and kill America’s enemy abroad were killed in the safety and security of home by, in essence, the same enemy – a man who believes in and supports everything the enemy does.
And he’s a U.S. Army major.
And his superior officers and other authorities knew about his beliefs but seemed to think it was just a bit of harmless multicultural diversity – as if believing that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor” (i.e., his fellow American soldiers) and writing Internet paeans to the “noble” “heroism” of suicide bombers and, indeed, objectively supporting the other side in an active war is to be regarded as just some kind of alternative lifestyle that adds to the general vibrancy of the base.
Jeffrey Goldberg noticed the same hole:
I am not arguing, of course, that American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America (I’ve argued the opposite, in fact). But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.
This hole, this blind spot, is not a good thing. While I certainly do not advocate condemning every member of any group for the actions of a few, turning a blind eye to those bad actors is not intelligent. In fact, it is ultimately suicidal. Excessive tolerance is pathological.
Jim Hoft is all over what is happening in Tehran. There is blood in the streets.
>In Baharestan Square the Police are shooting. A girl is shot and the police are not allowing to let the people help them.
>Cell network down in Baharestan & nearby area
>Conflict still in Baharestan Sq they even people who talk with their cellphone
>The girl who was shot was taken to a private clinic, not known yet of her well being…alive or not?
>People gathered in Baharestan but police & plain cloths don’t let the core of the rally to form
>All shops and Passages are closed at Baharestan SQ, Gunshot being heard from Jomhori St
> Gunshot being heard at Baharestan Square.
>About 5,000 Protesters gatherd at Sadeghieh Sq, Bassij and Hezbollah attcking them
>Hezbollah Attcked to some people trying to gather at Tajrish Square
>Army Helycopters flying over Enghelab Sq. Army Vans moving toward Azadi St with heavy Machine Guns.
>Hezbollah Attcked to some people trying to gather at Tajrish Sq.
>Protesters gatherd at Sepah Sq
>More than 3 people have been shot in Baharestan’s conflict, The shooting is still continues and conflicts increasing!!!!
I can see this ending very badly for the mullahs, even though they have the upper hand right now. There is a big difference between a country like Iran and one like, say, Burma. The people of Iran know that the people can throw off an unpopular regime having done so before.
On a very slightly bright note, the Obama administration appears to have withdrawn its offer of all the hot dogs the mullahs could eat on the 4th of July.
The very last parade given by the British survivors of the D-Day landings in Normandy in honor of those who did not return is over. The veterans, all very old now, will not organize another parade.
They stood proudly, remembering those who served bravely alongside them.
Hundreds of veterans defied humid weather yesterday to pay tribute on their last memorial service in London.
With heads held high they marched down Whitehall, some with walking sticks and others in wheelchairs.
Decked out in smart blazers and berets many shed a tear as they attended the memorial for the last time
At least two former soldiers collapsed during the service, as the heat and long time spent on their feet proved simply too much.
The Normandy Veterans Association (NVA) said this is the last memorial service they will organise in London as it has become increasingly difficult to hold, because of the age of veterans.
There are fewer and fewer veterans of the D-Day landings, or indeed of the entire Second World War now. After all, it has been 65 years since the landings. Yet these men have carried on, year after year to pay tribute to those who did not survive the war.
They still serve, all these years later.
It is now up to those younger people who were not alive during the Second World War to remember the fallen and all who served in the name of freedom and liberty. Let us not take that duty less lightly than the veterans have done for all these years.
“…Whether you know it or not.” Mark Steyn:
There’s a very basic lesson here: For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option. Even if you’re genuinely neutral. In the early Nineties, the attitude of much of the West to the disintegrating Yugoslavia was summed up in the brute dismissal of James Baker that America didn’t have a dog in this fight. Fair enough. But over in the Balkans junkyard the various mangy old pooches saw it rather differently. And so did the Muslim world, which regarded British and European “neutrality” as a form of complicity in mass murder. As Osama bin Laden put it:
“The British are responsible for destroying the Caliphate system. They are the ones who created the Palestinian problem. They are the ones who created the Kashmiri problem. They are the ones who put the arms embargo on the Muslims of Bosnia so that 2 million Muslims were killed.”
How come a catalog of imperial interventions wound up with that bit of scrupulous nonimperial nonintervention? Because great-power “even-handedness” will invariably be received as a form of one-handedness by the time its effects are felt on the other side of the world. Western “even-handedness” on Bosnia was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of European Muslims. They swarmed to the Balkans to support their co-religionists and ran into a bunch of Wahhabi imams moving into the neighborhood with lots of Saudi money and anxious to fill their Rolodex with useful contacts in the West. Among the alumni of that conflict was the hitherto impeccably assimilated English public (i.e., private) schoolboy and London School of Economics student who went on to behead The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl. You always have a dog in the fight, whether you know it or not.
Studied neutrality is met with contempt by the dictators of the world. That is why Obama’s cautiously neutral response over the past week is such a problem. There was at least a somewhat better response from the White House yesterday. It is not enough. The west, especially the United States, has got to stand for something. Liberty would be the right message to be on right now. Denouncing the evil of Iran’s mullahs would be the right thing to do. Publicly refusing to even consider negotiating with Iran for any reason as long as the mullahs kill their own people would be a good place to start.
We cannot be neutral when liberty is at stake. We always have a dog in that race.
The BBC is reporting that Mir Hossein Mousavi did NOT attend a scheduled meeting with the Guardian Council today. Had he done so, one suspects he would already be dead – or wishing he was.
Mr Mousavi had been expected, along with fellow challengers Mr Karroubi and Mohsen Rezai, to discuss more than 600 objections they had filed complaining about the poll at a meeting of the Guardian Council, which certifies elections, on Saturday.
But neither Mr Mousavi nor Mr Karroubi attended the meeting – which suggests, our correspondent says, they have abandoned their legal challenge to the election results.
Again, time for the west, especially the US, to denounce the mullahs brutality toward their own people. Specifically place the blame for the violence where it belongs.
Great roundup from Ed Morrisey, I will not even begin to try to catch up to him, go over and check it out. Warning, he has some pretty harsh videos up over there.
It would appear that the people have taken matters into their own hands. Keep your thoughts and prayers with them, they will need all the help they can get.
Now would be a good time for the western governments to denounce the Mullahs for their brutality. It would at least send some small bit of hope to those fighting for their freedom.
The words of historian SLA Marshall from a 1960 article in The Atlantic. His subject is Lieutenant Walter Taylor and the breakout from Omaha Beach:
Taylor is a luminous figure in the story of D Day, one of the forty-seven immortals of Omaha who, by their dauntless initiative at widely separated points along the beach, saved the landing from total stagnation and disaster. Courage and luck are his in extraordinary measure.
When Baker Company’s assault wave breaks up just short of the surf where Able Company is in ordeal, Taylor’s coxswain swings his boat sharp left, then heads toward the shore about halfway between Zappacosta’s boat and Williams’. Until a few seconds after the ramp drops, this bit of beach next to the village called Hamel-au-Prêtre is blessedly clear of fire. No mortar shells crown the start. Taylor leads his section crawling across the beach and over the sea wall, losing four men killed and two wounded (machine-gun fire) in this brief movement. Some yards off to his right, Taylor has seen Lieutenants Harold Donaldson and Emil Winkler shot dead. But there is no halt for reflection; Taylor leads the section by trail straight up the bluff and into Vierville, where his luck continues. In a two-hour fight he whips a German platoon without losing a man.
Marshal sums Taylor’s story up with a line that is used in the title of this post:
Thousands of Americans were spilled onto Omaha Beach. The high ground was won by a handful of men like Taylor who on that day burned with a flame bright beyond common understanding.
June 6, 1944. 65 years later, that flame burns as brightly.
(Photo via Wikipedia)
Nial Gardiner in The Telegraph:
No leader in American history has gone to greater lengths than Barack Obama to make amends for his own country. From condemnation of American “arrogance” in a speech in Strasbourg to acknowledging U.S. “mistakes” before millions of Muslims on Arab television, Obama has rarely missed an opportunity to apologise for the actions of the American people.
President Obama has elevated the art of national self-loathing to new heights, and seems to delight in prostrating the most powerful nation on the face of the earth before its critics and rivals, especially on foreign soil. The Obama worldview revolves around the central premise that the United States must be humble and “engage” and work with its enemies through the application of “smart power”. There is nothing smart, however, in appeasing rogue states such as North Korea or Iran.
Barack Obama is about to travel to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Germany. One simply cannot wait to hear what Obama will apologize for this time. John Hinderaker over at Powerline notes the insanely clumsy German itinerary: Buchenwald and Dresden.
Yes, we here in America have much to be sorry for at this point:
Aisne-Marne, France
Ardennes, Belgium
Brittany, France
Brookwood, England
Cambridge, England
Epinal, France
Flanders Field, Belgium
Florence, Italy
Henri-Chapelle, Belgium
Lorraine, France
Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Meuse-Argonne, France
Netherlands, Netherlands
Normandy, France
North Africa, Tunisia
Oise-Aisne, France
Rhone, France
Sicily-Rome, Italy
Somme, France
St. Mihiel, France
Suresnes, France
At this point, I’m sorry that so very, very many Americans gave their lives to twice free a continent from German aggression. There are more than 100,000 Americans officially buried in Europe and North Africa - Lord knows how many more are there in unmarked graves. For those sacrifices, we are given disdain, contempt and abuse by far too many in Europe.
Perhaps it is time – past time, really – for us to bring them home. All of them. Both our war dead and the living American troops that have secured Europe for 65 years now.
(This post is in no way meant to be disrespectful toward the American Battle Monuments Commission which has done fantastic work in keeping these monuments to our fallen heroes in the fine condition they are. If you get to Europe, try to make it a point to visit one of the many cemeteries. As this article points out, a tour can be a highlight of a trip.)
So says The Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Obama, for his part, still wants Gitmo closed, and he cited South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham in saying that the idea that the detainees could not be securely held in the U.S. was “not rational.” Apparently also irrational is FBI Director Robert Mueller, who this week told Congress that bringing the detainees even to U.S. prisons raised serious concerns, “from providing financing, radicalizing others, [to] the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States.”
Yet for all of his attacks on the Bush Administration, which he accused of making “decisions based upon fear rather than foresight,” Mr. Obama stuck with his predecessor’s support for military commissions, adding some procedural bells and whistles as political cover to justify his past opposition. For the record: Both the left and right, from the ACLU to Dick Cheney, now agree that the President has all but embraced the Bush policy.
But if Obama does close Gitmo, you may already be a winner! Check here to see if your state could become the storage location for detainees.
Obamantics, War | Gaius January 30, 2010 | 
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