If one needs any more proof that Democrats are playing politics with the war on “terror,” this is it. The Obama administration is playing fast and loose with numbers in order to make the case for their criminally insane idea to try terrorists in civil court like common jaywalkers. How? By insisting that it all worked well under Bush, so why object if they do it?
Wait a minute! I thought Bush was violating the civil rights of terrorists by letting them languish at G’tmo and not getting their day in court. I thought Obama was going to execute the war on “terror” better, smarter, and gentler than Bush.
It depends on how you spin it, baby—more specifically, how you define “terrorist.” Alec Aramanda at the Heritage Foundation’s blog explains:
… Attorney General Holder essentially conceded to the Senate Judiciary that there has not been one successful federal trial of an enemy combatant, captured overseas by our military, since 9/11. Read Heritage Senior Fellow Cully Stimson’s (former federal prosecutor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs) op-ed on Holder’s testimony here.
The Administration’s numbers come from a report by a liberal organization called Human Rights First. Now, thanks to another outstanding article by Andrew McCarthy, we know the truth about the numbers and the Human Rights First terrorist trial report. The report analyzed 119 “terrorism-related” cases with 289 defendants (as of June 2, 2009) and found that 195 were convicted for a 91% conviction rate. But McCarthy, the former Assistant US Attorney in Southern New York and writer for National Review, explains that in its political calculation of “doubling down on civilian due process,” the Left is playing a bogus numbers game.
Here is an interesting excerpt from that McCarthy article:
“We need to develop a greater resiliency in this country on security issues,” Sarah E. Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the New York Times. “The administration needs to remind the American public that we have convicted 195 international terrorists in federal courts since 2001.”
And naturally, the New York Times, which for seven years excoriated the Bush administration for every imagined civil- and human-rights abuse of everyone—terrorists or ordinary American civilians—dutifully touts the new party line: Under Bush, everyone rightly got their day in court. So why are righties complaining now that Obama’s doing it?
Alamandra continues:
The report itself states that the 195 figure includes, “acts of terrorism, attempts or conspiracies to commit terrorism, or providing aid and support to those engaged in terrorism”, as well as, “charges under “alternative” statutes such as false statements, financial fraud, and immigration fraud.”
But The New York Times and at least one member of Congress have been bragging that civilian courts have convicted 195 terrorists. Of the 195 convictions, 11 resulted in life sentences (that’s slightly over 5.6% of all convictions). And for the remaining 184 convictions, the average prison sentence was only 8.41 years, with a median prison term of a mere 4.83 years. Some 73 defendants were convicted of material support, 28 for money laundering, 21 for false statements, and 12 for racketeering. Nine were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder, and 6 were convicted of killing a U.S. national. Eight years of prison isn’t enough time for a hardened terrorist, and the simple fact is that many of these convictions are not “international terrorists” or those actively plotting terror attacks. …
So out of that ridiculously bloated 195 figure, only six actually killed anyone, and nine were planning to. Here’s my question: Did any of those individuals get executed? If not, then the system Eric Holder is so enamored of doesn’t work after all, and we’re in deep sh*t.
It gets worse:
However, there are other groups trotting out different sets of numbers. The Justice Department has its own number being used to boost the anti-terrorism credentials of civilian courts. According to a DOJ fact sheet [6], “Hundreds of terrorism suspects have been successfully prosecuted in federal court since 9/11. Today, there are more than 300 international or domestic terrorists incarcerated in U.S. federal prison facilities.” The numbers parade doesn’t stop there. According to an ACLU website dedicated to “Myths and Realities About the Patriot Act”, the then- Bush Administration, “overstates [the] actual number of convictions and omits a number of key facts related to these numbers,” and that the convictions were more commonly for, “charges of passport violations, fraud, false statements, and conspiracy.” The ACLU claims that out of a reported 361 terrorism cases (as of 2004) only 39 individuals were actually convicted of crimes related to terrorism – with a median sentence of 11 months.
The discrepancy among these figures is political. The DOJ naturally wants to boast a strong conviction record of terrorists, whereas the ACLU, according to McCarthy, seeks to paint the terrorist threat as exaggerated. …
And there’s the rub. Political number-rigging to make the Bush administration look bad, to hell with the long-term consequences on national security. As McCarthy explains, once more from the cited article:
The numbers rigging, moreover, is a bit rich coming from left-wing lawyers. They spent the seven years after 9/11 accusing the Bush Justice Department of artificially inflating its numbers to convey a false sense of counterterrorism effectiveness. How? By opening cases as terrorism investigations but disposing of them without terrorism charges — especially through the immigration laws (i.e., deporting suspected terrorists and facilitators).
That’s right: When the Bush administration used the immigration laws to boot terror suspects out of the country, the Left and its fellow travelers like CAIR claimed this was racial profiling masquerading as counterterrorism. Now, in the age of Obama, we learn from HRF that “immigration fraud” counts as a “terrorism case” — so the group can boost the numbers and claim that the same Justice Department (under the Bush administration for most of the period covered in the report) has done a great job of combating terrorism in civilian court.
The Obama administration is playing dangerous games, I believe, to settle some score with the previous administration for political points. They’re still licking their chops over the idea of having George W. Bush and Dick Cheney humiliated before the world, our own national security be damned. Eric Holder should resign for directly and indirectly playing politics with captured terrorists, whether it’s KSM or the “underwear bomber.” These games are going to get us killed.
Related reading: American Spectator – Obama’s Miranda Madness
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