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IT'S WAR, NOT A CRIME SPREE |
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Written by Sarah Palin
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Wednesday, 06 January 2010 |
President Obama's meeting with his top national security
advisers does nothing to change the fact that his fundamental approach to
terrorism is fatally flawed. We are at war with radical Islamic extremists and
treating this threat as a law enforcement issue is dangerous for our nation's
security.
That's what happened in the 1990s and we saw the result on September 11, 2001. This is a war on
terror not an "overseas contingency operation." Acts of terrorism are just
that, not "man caused disasters."
The system did not work. Abdulmutallab was a child of
privilege radicalized and trained by organized jihadists, not an "isolated
extremist" who traveled to a land of "crushing poverty." He is an enemy of the United
States, not just another criminal defendant.
It simply makes no sense to treat an al Qaeda-trained operative willing to die
in the course of massacring hundreds of people as a common criminal. Reports
indicate that Abdulmutallab stated there were many more like him in Yemen
but that he stopped talking once he was read his Miranda rights.
President Obama's advisers lamely claim Abdulmutallab might
be willing to agree to a plea bargain - pretty doubtful you can cut a deal with
a suicide bomber. John Brennan, the President's top counterterrorism adviser,
bizarrely claimed "there are no downsides or upsides" to treating terrorists as
enemy combatants. That is absurd.
There is a very serious downside to treating them as
criminals: terrorists invoke their "right" to remain silent and stop talking.
Terrorists don't tell us where they were trained, what they were trained in,
who they were trained by, and who they were trained with.
Giving foreign-born, foreign-trained terrorists the right to
remain silent does nothing to keep Americans safe from terrorist threats. It
only gives our enemies access to courtrooms where they can publicly grandstand,
and to defense attorneys who can manipulate the legal process to gain access to
classified information.
President Obama was right to change his policy and decide to send no more
detainees to Yemen
where they can be free to rejoin their war on America.
Now he must back off his reckless plan to close Guantanamo,
begin treating terrorists as wartime enemies not suspects alleged to have
committed crimes, and recognize that the real nature of the terrorist threat
requires a commander-in-chief, not a constitutional law professor.
Sarah Palin is the former Governor of Alaska and in the prayers of many the future President of the United States.
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