al Qaeda

9/11, al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Debra Burlingame, detainees, Gitmo, Guantanamo

‘We will live to regret’ moving al Qaeda to Illinois: Debra Burlingame

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BigGovernment.com has posted a leaked memorandum from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Attorney General Eric Holder that, in part, reads:

“The Secretary of Defense shall relocate detainees currently held at the Guantanamo Detention Facility to the [Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Illinois] as expeditiously as possible.”

Subsequently, 911 Never Forget Coalition co-founder Debra Burlingame issued the following statement:

Who would have believed after 9/11 that our own president, the commander-in-chief who recently announced that he was sending another 30,000 troops to risk their lives in Afghanistan, would order that the enemy combatants captured on the battlefield must be brought into the United States. We will live to regret this.

Barack Obama continues to cast the closing of Guantanamo and the importation of Al Qaeda terrorists into the American heartland as a moral victory. But this is nothing more than moral vanity and rank political theater aimed at satisfying his liberal soul mates at the ACLU and Human Rights First. In truth, the security nightmare he is about to visit on this country will only be surpassed by the legal morass which will accompany the transfer of foreign terrorists to American soil. The moment the detainees arrive, their lawyers will drop an avalanche of legal challenges on the federal courts seeking to set them free, destroy what is left of the military commissions, and turn the 9/11 trial into a tragic farce. Americans should remember this: it doesn’t have to happen. The Supreme Court said that Gitmo is lawful and that preventative detentions are Constitutional. Barack Obama — and members of Congress who stand by and do nothing to stop him — will own this national security disaster.

Debra Burlingame
Co-founder, 9/11 Never Forget Coalition
Director, Keep America Safe

9/11, al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Gitmo, Ground Zero, Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Military Commissions

Hold war criminals accountable now; a year is too long to spend at a crime scene with people shooting at you

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Attorney General Eric Holder made an “unannounced” visit with Assistant U.S. Attorneys in Manhattan yesterday about the planned prosecution there of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four additional 9/11 conspirators. Also yesterday, NBC New York spot polling indicated that 82% became furious when word leaked “a federal grand jury in New York is [secretly] now hearing evidence and testimony” as prosecutors seek a federal indictment of the five. Perhaps coincidentally, one 9/11 family member’s commentary appeared and offered, “In four years, America can hold Obama accountable.”

In total, federal prosecutions during the 1990s convicted two dozen for the first bombing of the World Trade Center, Landmark plot, and the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. Yet no U.S. official was held accountable for not preventing those attacks or the bombing of the Kobar Towers and the U.S.S. Cole. Instead, valuable intelligence reached Osama bin Laden about al Qaeda’s membership and organization and those trials inspired thousands off to the jihad in Afghanistan. Former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White has said it will take at least three years just to prepare a federal trial for the five 9/11 conspirators because prosecutors must review 538,000 pieces of evidence and more than a million documents.

This is far more than just about the fate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.