World Trade Center

9/11, Osama bin Laden, World Trade Center

‘A dead terrorist is a good terrorist’ and a fine example

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We are better than the terrorists are. But do we need to do them one better by committing national suicide to prove it?

In the New York Post this morning, retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters in part writes:

Recent events should have made it clear — again — that captive terrorists are overwhelmingly a liability. The meager intelligence we get interrogating them is rarely commensurate with the array of financial, moral and legal costs involved in keeping them locked up.

Worst of all (as I’ve repeatedly argued), a jailed terrorist, not a dead one, is the true “martyr.” Incarcerated terrorists become celebrated causes for our domestic left and rallying points for foreign fanatics. The dead just rot.

Later, Peters adds:

A dead terrorist is a good terrorist. Keeps costs down, too.

To be clear: I do not advocate executing prisoners. We should treat any terrorist we capture rigorously, but with basic decency. I would only condone forceful interrogation methods in the most exceptional cases (there are always exceptions in real life, once you leave the rarefied air of the law library or the campus).
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And killing terrorists doesn’t put us on a “slippery slope.” Killing Osama or Ayman al-Zawahiri wouldn’t inevitably mean that our Special Forces would then turn to assassinating Iowa aldermen or Alabama church deacons.

Or the families of American lawyers (my words added to Mr. Peters’ latter thought).

It seems noble to assert that non-American, unlawful enemy combatants on kinetic battlefields and aiding them — even those targeting civilians — should be afforded the very rule of law they would deny us.

Among those pulverized on 9/11 were eight precious children 11-years-old and younger, including one toddler of which nothing was found. We placed those wee souls at greater risk when we provided due process to the Landmark bomb plotters and those who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993. If we now unilaterally provide foreign terrorists caught on foreign ground full legal rights, we will reap many smaller funeral plots on that moral high ground.

Our light to the world’s children now flickers in a growing gale of political crosswinds.

Perhaps that means many suspected terrorists must be destroyed and some greatly discomforted. We should not choose to lose this war and let our distaste for their misfortune extinguish liberty’s brightest flame, for their children’s sake as well as our own.

9/11, Barack Obama, jihadists, Political wind, World Trade Center

Obama’s America Is September 10th America: Andrew McCarthy

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Barack Obama is obviously running to become America’s Lawyer-in-Chief.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy says Senator John McCain should ask Senator Barack Obama this question everyday: How is that strategy of prosecuting him [bin Laden] in the criminal-justice system working out? He points out this naive assertion yesterday by Mr. Obama:

What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.

And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, “Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.”

So that, I think, is an example of something that was unnecessary. We could have done the exact same thing, but done it in a way that was consistent with our laws.

Mr. Obama has no experience as a prosecutor and only briefly taught Constitutional law. Compare that to Mr. McCarthy’s considerable experience as a federal prosecutor and the lead prosecutor of those who conducted the first attack upon the World Trade Center. Here is, in part, the latter’s response:

The fact is that we used the criminal justice system as our principal enforcement approach, the approach Obama intends to reinstate, for eight years — from the bombing of the World Trade Center until the shocking destruction of that complex on 9/11. During that timeframe, while the enemy was growing stronger and attacking more audaciously, we managed to prosecute successfully less than three dozen terrorists (29 to be precise). And with a handful of exceptions, they were the lowest ranking of players.

I’ll add that 9/11 and all the other successful attacks inside and outside our nation’s borders that previous law enforcement counter-terrorism efforts failed to prevent are what gave a huge boost to Islamic terrorist recruitment. Killing every Islamic terrorist that we identify or (if we unfortunately capture them alive) locking them in a cell until they are dead or too feeble-minded to contribute to the jihad would at least lower their reenlistment rates substantially; feeding detainees a couple times each day is, in my mind, all the process they are due.