And Now, For Some More of the Same…..”The Ghailani Debacle”…..

……..an article by Jennifer Rubin at Commentary:

“The acquittal of Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani yesterday on all but one of 285 counts in connection with the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania has once again demonstrated that the leftist lawyers’ experiment in applying civilian trial rules to terrorists is gravely misguided and downright dangerous. The soon-to-be House chairman on homeland security, Peter King, issued a statement blasting the trial outcome and the nonchalant response from the Justice Department:

“I am disgusted at the total miscarriage of justice today in Manhattan’s federal civilian court.  In a case where Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was facing 285 criminal counts, including hundreds of murder charges, and where Attorney General Eric Holder assured us that ‘failure is not an option,’ the jury found him guilty on only one count and acquitted him of all other counts including every murder charge. This tragic verdict demonstrates the absolute insanity of the Obama Administration’s decision to try al-Qaeda terrorists in civilian courts”

The Congress can start by ending federal-court jurisdiction over detainees. Then they should demand Eric Holder’s resignation — preferably before his serially wrong advice causes any more damage to our national security.

Let’s review what went on here. First, this was a case of mass murder. As the New York Times explains:

[P]rosecutors built a circumstantial case to try to establish that Mr. Ghailani had played a key logistical role in the preparations for the Tanzania attack.

They said the evidence showed that he helped to buy the Nissan Atlas truck that was used to carry the bomb, and gas tanks that were placed inside the truck to intensify the blast. He also stored an explosive detonator in an armoire he used, and his cellphone became the “operational phone” for the plotters in the weeks leading up to the attacks, prosecutors contended.

The attacks, orchestrated by Al Qaeda, killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded thousands of others.

But the case was ill-suited to civilian courts, and a key witness was excluded from testifying:

But because of the unusual circumstances of Mr. Ghailani’s case — after he was captured in Pakistan in 2004, he was held for nearly five years in a so-called black site run by the Central Intelligence Agency and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the prosecution faced significant legal hurdles getting his case to trial. And last month, the government lost a key ruling on the eve of trial that may have seriously damaged their chances of winning convictions.

In the ruling, the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, barred them from using an important witness against Mr. Ghailani because the government had learned about the man through Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation while he was in C.I.A. custody, where his lawyers say he was tortured.

The witness, Hussein Abebe, would have testified that he had sold Mr. Ghailani the large quantities of TNT used to blow up the embassy in Dar es Salaam, prosecutors told the judge, calling him “a giant witness for the government.”

The judge called it correctly, and explicitly warned the government of “the potential damage of excluding the witness when he said in his ruling that Mr. Ghailani’s status of ‘enemy combatant’ probably would permit his detention as something akin ‘to a prisoner of war until hostilities between the United States and Al Qaeda and the Taliban end, even if he were found not guilty.’”

In other words, what in the world was the bomber doing in an Article III courtroom? He was, quite bluntly, part of a stunt by the Obama administration, which had vilified Bush administration lawyers for failing to accord terrorists the full panoply of constitutional rights available to American citizens who are arrested by police officers and held pursuant to constitutional requirements.

Once again, the Obama team has revealed itself to be entirely incompetent and has proved, maybe even to themselves, the obvious: the Bush administration had it right. And in fact, maybe we should do away with both civilian trials and military tribunals and just hold these killers until hostilities end. You know, like they do in wars.”

From The Ghailani Fiasco: It’s “Time For Holder to Go”

“Time for Holder to Go”

Article by Ed Morrissey, Hot Air:

Let’s face it.  Barack Obama and Eric Holder gambled their entire national-security credibility on the Ahmed “Foopie” Ghailani trial, arguing that they could get convictions of detainees captured abroad by military and intelligence assets while using federal courts as a venue rather than the military commissions that Congress repeatedly authorized for that purpose.  Holder scolded critics who pointed out all of the reasons that such a strategy was much more likely to fail for “politicizing” the process, especially in regard to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose case is more problematic than Ghailani’s, where the FBI did a large part of the investigation before intelligence assets were used to seize and interrogate Ghailani.

The failure of Holder’s DoJ to win anything more than a single conspiracy count against Ghailani as a result of using a process designed for domestic criminals than wartime enemies shows that the critics had it right all along.  It also shows that both Obama and Holder have been proven spectacularly wrong, since a man who confessed to the murder of over two hundred people will now face as little as 20 years, with a big chunk of whatever sentence Foopie receives being reduced by time already served.

The administration is left with three choices in regards to Ghailani: announce that they will release him at the appointed date whenever his sentence ends, announce that they will hold him indefinitely without regard to the court’s ruling on the matter while referring the case back to a military commission despite his acquittals, or refuse to state which they will do and hope the issue falls to the next administration.  The first will mean that the US will knowingly release a master al-Qaeda terrorist with more than two hundred murders under his belt; the second will mean that the trial they staged was nothing but a sham.  And the third will be a cowardly dodge.

Such is the state in which Holder as Attorney General has left the US.  Either the US is so inept that it will eventually release a man who attacked two of its embassies abroad (which was an act of war by al-Qaeda) or that the DoJ may commit an impeachable act by knowingly submitting a defendant to double jeopardy, whether in this administration or a future administration.  By committing to the civilian criminal system and assigning judicial jurisdiction where it never belonged, those are the only options left.

It was that decision that created the entirely predictable set of decisions that forced the judge to exclude the evidence gleaned by intelligence interrogation that proved Ghailani guilty — a cascade of consequences foreseen by critics and arrogantly sneered at by this administration as “politicization.”  It’s both the arrogance and the incompetence that requires Eric Holder’s termination as Attorney General.  Holder made these decisions and hotly defended them as perfectly reasonable, with no reduced chance of getting convictions in these cases.

A less arrogant — and less ideological — Attorney General would have heeded Congress’ warnings and reconsidered the wisdom of the idea of shoehorning foreign-captured war criminals into venues where they have never been adjudicated before now.  And a less arrogant administration would have not defied the will of Congress, which three times set up military commission processes for these very cases, and for the very reasons that the DoJ spectacularly failed this week.

There could be no greater failure by the DoJ in this war on terror than to get these decisions wrong, especially in light of the avalanche of criticism over those decisions and the administration’s reaction to it.  Holder should hand in his resignation before he makes the same mistake with the other terrorists our military and intelligence assets risked their lives to keep off the battlefield forever.  His continued presence insults their work, insults Congress, and insults our desire for justice for 9/11, the USS Cole bombing, the two embassy bombings, and the other terrorist attacks and plots we’ve managed to stop through a forward strategy on the war on terror.  If a resignation is not forthcoming, the Senate and House Judiciary committees should start hearings to determine why Holder remains in this position.”

Comment:  The entire Obama administration acts  between  flake and sleeze.  

Count the ‘countless’ embarrassments, failures, faux pas, bowings, foolish and dishonest words, the disorder of priorities and absence of reality…….patting around junk and crotch of K through 12 and all ages beyond, unless muslim………Van Jones, Anita Dunn, Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, Charlie Rangel, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi,  and the Czars and Cabinet Lefties, Ben Nelson, the Louisiana Purchase, the Dems too proud to pay taxes, and Obama father figure, Jeremiah “Goddamn America” Wright, “Safer than it has been in over twenty years” southern border, claim of the president, the one printing  $600,000,000,000 in  paper money to pay interest  on his $4,500,000,000,000 skyrocketing debt and pretending  the  people got from Obama  a  universal health care law at lower cost, by adding 40,000,000  people previously uninsured.   Chief Economist Obama said so.

It is an untrustworthy cabinet of an untrustworthy adminstration of an unstrustworthy President.

Democratic Senator Connected to NPR Wants to Ban Fox Cable News

Lefty Alan Colmes, the company Lefty on Fox Cable News for years reports the following at his site, Liberaland:

“Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia somehow believes that free speech exercised on FOX News and MSNBC makes his job harder, and in his heart of hearts he wishes the government could shut them up.

At a Senate committee hearing about television retransmission consent on Wednesday, Mr. Rockefeller spoke broadly about the ways he believes television is ailing, and in doing so he singled out the “endless barking” of cable news.

He said: “There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the F.C.C. to say to Fox and to MSNBC, ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse; to our ability to do our work here in Congress; and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and, more importantly, in their future.”

Sadly for Senator Rockefeller,  the FCC doesn’t have authority over cable televison.”

Comment:  Alan Colmes is in the reporting business.  Even though he is a programmed lefty,   I  applaud him for his  recognizing   a basic tenet of democratic society….which happens to be written in the First Amendment to our  National Constitution.

Mr. Colmes does not mention that Jay Rockefeller’s wife is on the board at National Public Radio…….the national leftwing propaganda radio which receives tax payer support.

The deeply intolerant cannot stand folks who think otherwise.  Most of the more intolerant in America these days are Democrats, especially those leftier.  They are the creators and defenders of the imprisonments of political correctness. 

They are the purveyors and purifiers of the new religion, so popular  in American academia, Marxism.   They  bleat the political beat at National Public Radio.

To these extra blessed, smarter than thou new world Marxists the less blessed conservatives are in the way as Fox News is in the way of Jay Rockefeller’s political certitude.  He could be relieved of hisfears and  bigotry if Fox and other sources similar were non- existent, in which case he would be correct on every front about  anything he says, writes, and legislates……America’s Most Perfect Authority!

To the Jay Rockefellers “democracy is  for me but  never for thee”……the goal of nearly every leftwinger I have ever known.  

Most Americans believe Congress is ailing.   They said so a few weeks ago loud and clear.  There’s a little bug in me which says America would be a far better society with  a better culture, and my job as a small business owner and anateur blog writer would be a lot easier if Leftwing Democrats, the Marxist kind didn’t exist, or at least   would clean  themselves up and straighten out the mess they have made in Washington for the past 50 years, or simply disappear……but America needs them to know their wrongs in contrast to  the conservative right.

They must and will be defeated democratically.   I could not be a conservative and attempt to  defeat  opponents  through tyranny.    Democracy is a process, not a finished product.

Jay Rockefeller is remindful of Ted Koppel, one of the most pompous, ill educated, loud mouthed Lefty cooks  in the American news kitchen…..a news -feeding  figure  from  the Jimmy Carter-Embassy crisis in Teheran thirty years ago, when I was a Democrat.  His airs while reporting have always smelled of his own brew of holy water. 

Koppel too, bemoans the disappearance of the Lefty universal news coverage of his time at ABC  and at most of the news media even today.   He, too, has disappeared  from the socialist muck raking news limelight with   the rise of “entertainment reporting” at Fox News and the rancid rants at  MSNBC. 

Neither may be news reporting at its best, but it is better than whereever Ted Koppel showed up.

He, and his blueblood Lefties still have  BBC  America and NPR led by Vivian Schiller to spread the  truths of the God that Failed.  Hasn’t Ted moved on to NPR as well?

Roger Kimball Passes by Cuba, Thinking “Guantanamo Bay and Obama.

“According to my GPS, we are just passing Cuba, whose green hills look lush and inviting off the starboard beam. The name “Cuba” brings to mind the delicious cigars that were circulating on the rear deck last night as a hearty gaggle of National Review “cursers”—that’s Jay Nordlinger’s affectionate term for us—gathered in celebration of a day well spent. The spectacle of Cuba slipping by my window also bring to mind Guantanamo Bay, a facility for which I take this occasion to give thanks.

Thanks? You betcha. How nice that so many of those folks whose goal in life is to murder infidels, i.e., you and me, should be segregated here, a very long swim away from the nearest Boeing 767 to say nothing of any spare boxes of Semtex.

Highlights from yesterday’s panels included Jay Nordlinger’s interview of Bernard Lewis, the eminent scholar of Islam and the Ottoman Empire, and a panel discussion, moderated by NR’s editor Rich Lowry, in which Mr. Lewis along with Andrew McCarthy (you do have his new book The Grand Jihad, right?),
the military correspondent Bing West, John O’Sullivan, Victor David Hanson, and Michael Novak.

Jay’s interview with Mr. Lewis yielded a moderately depressing if familiar litany. The twin facts of 1) massive Islamic immigration and 2) demographic reality ordain that Europe is “inexorably” on its way—well on its way—to Islamicization. Christian Europe has more or less stopped reproducing itself, Islamic Europe is a thriving maternity ward. Sooner or later there will be a reaction to this—possibly an unpleasant reaction—but, said Mr. Lewis, it will probably be too late. The next chapter for the continent known as Europe will be either “Islamized Europe or European Islam. Take your pick.

How about in the Untied States? The demography is not so depressing: fewer Muslims, higher (if only slightly higher) indigenous birth rate. Does the United States have the moxie, the cultural confidence and belief in its own civilization, to overcome the forces of disintegration that assail it? Mr. Lewis said that until a few years ago, the thought the answer was “Yes.” Now, he said, he wonders, which I suppose is slightly more encouraging than a flat out “No.”

Rich Lowry’s opening question was this: are all disputes negotiable? President Obama went to Cairo in 2009 to proclaim a “new beginning” in the relationship between Islam and the West. The key thing to remember, it seems to me, is that a relationship is a two-sided transaction. It’s pleasant to contemplate the universal comity that President Obama’s peace offerings conjure up. What trouble me are folks like Hussein Massawi, a former Hezbollah leader. “We aren;t fighting,” said Massawi, “so that you will give us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.” Rather puts paid to the idea of “negotiation,” doesn’t? At any rate, it reduces negotiation to a choice of what type of casket you’d like for yourself. “And will you be preferring burial or cremation, Madam?”

One problem, as Victor Davis Hanson pointed out, concerns arithmetic. People like President Obama keep reminding us that the majority—the vast majority—of Muslims are not violent jihadist. Noted. Most Muslims, indeed, are horrified by the gruesome antics of their co-religionists: steering airliners into skyscrapers, hacking of the heads of offending journalists, stabbing errant filmmakers: they don’t like it anymore than you or I do.

The problem—well, one problem—is that residue, that “tiny minority.” How tiny is “tiny”? A common estimate is that there 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. Lots and lots of them are just folks, struggling to make the best of things for themselves and there families. But the others? Let’s look at that number 1.2 billion. First, lets give it its zeros:

1,200,000,000

Ten percent is one hundred and twenty million:

120,000,000

One percent—a pretty small minority!—is 12 million.

12,000,000

A tenth of that—not .1, not .01, but .001 percent— is still one million two hundred thousand:

1,200,000

What if there were one million two hundred thousand Osama bin Laden’s in potentia?

Such reflections probably explain why, despite his hopey-dopey “new beginning” “he’s-just-an-isolated-extremist” rhetoric, President Obama has quietly continued virtually all of President Bush’s initiatives when it comes to fighting the “Global War On Terror,” rebaptized as “overseas contingency operations” by the State Department but still deploying the whole panoply of Bush-era options, from renditions and detentions to the intrusive meddling of the “homeland security” department. Yesterday’s news that the 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Sheik Mohammed would not, after all, be tried in New York put another nail in the coffin of Obama’s misplaced optimism. What will happen now? Andy McCarthy speculated that, for the time being anyway, he will be detained without trial. If only the military commission that had been arranged for KSM had been allowed to proceed in the first first: U.S. taxpayers wouldn’t still be footing the bill for his upkeep and KSM, though he would have been shot or otherwise killed, would at least have been granted the dignity of a fair trial.

Yet another reason, don’t you think, to give thanks for Guantanamo Bay?”

Roger Kimball writes at the New Criterion and at Pajamas Media.

Tim Pawlenty Joins RNC Chairman, Mike Steele, Critics

“Michael Steele’s prospects for remaining head of the RNC continue to diminish. In the aftermath of Gentry Collins’ stinging indictment of Steele, three powerhouse governors have signaled that they believe it’s time for Steele to go.

Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, himself a former RNC chair, did more than signal this view; he flatly stated that the RNC needs a new chair. He then explained:

To defeat an incumbent president, even one that’s got the political problems of this one, the RNC has to operate at absolutely maximum capacity, and this year they operated far, far, far below that in terms of fundraising, in terms of grass-roots organization and in terms of building strong, self-reliant state parties

Rick Perry, governor of Texas, didn’t expressly comment on Steele. However, he clearly wants a new chair, having just endorsed Nick Ayers, executive director of the governors association, for the job.

Finally, Tim Pawlenty’s comments on the Collins letter leave little doubt about where the Minnesota governor stands. He stated that Collins’s assessment about the RNC’s performance in the 2010 election “concerns me a great deal.” Pawlenty noted that in every cycle, and especially in a presidential election, “you have to have a high-functioning, effective ground game,” and “it appears based on this letter that that didn’t happen” in 2010.”

Paul Mirengoff  at PowerLine wrote this piece.    It seems Mike Steele is becoming a big embarrassment for the Party.  He has stubbed his toes so many times as Party Chairman.   What a disappointment.

Senator Jim Webb: Ahmed Ghailani “actively participated in al-Qaeda attacks.” Calls on Obama to use Military Commission System

I am not a fan of  Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia.  When he first arrived for duty in Washington he was inexcusably coarse and rude to President George W. Bush whenever the had an audience to be so.   I have never forgotten his these stagings of his mouth and temperament.

But that was then.   Now he seems to be a Democrat who wishes to be relected and that test is coming up in 2012.

Here is his publicised take on the Ahmed Khalfan Ghkailani civil court ruling  yesterday:

“Senator Jim Webb issued the following statement regarding yesterday’s civilian court verdict for Ahmed Ghailani, who actively participated in al-Qaeda attacks in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Saalam, Tanzania, which killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. Ghailani was found guilty on a single conspiracy charge but cleared on 284 other counts.

“Yesterday’s verdict acquitting international terrorist Ahmed Gailani of 284 of the counts against him affirms what I and others have said from the beginning: those charged with crimes of war and those who have been determined to be dangerous law-of-war detainees do not belong in our courts, our prisons or our country. 

“I again call on President Obama to use the new military commission system that is in place to try the terrorist detainees currently held at the Guantanamo detention facilities.  The new commission system is consistent with international standards. Moreover, it balances robust procedural and substantive rights for the defendants, including prohibiting the introduction of evidence obtained through torture, against the reality that these are not common criminals but violators of the law of war.”

Comment:  The country will survive this court embarrassment cause by our doctrinaire  present president, Barack Hussein Obama.  It will survive the Obama presidency…..but in what condition?

The more often concerned Democrat Congressmen speak up for America’s interests, the more strengthened will be the country’s security and its democracy.   

Thank you, Senator Webb for your notice.

The Shame of Obama-Holder Gamesmanship in the Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani Court Fraud

When will the American people begin again to realize that it is TRUTH  which is worshipped at The Altar  central to any civilization based on human worth.   Seeking TRUTH is the cornerstone of learning……….Seeking TRUTH is the cornerstone of justice, the bloodline that keeps a free society free.

I have little faith in today’s  American educational and judicial systems.  They are both in decay.   Games are played by the most dishonest “respected” folk of our society, the lawyer and the professor,  many, if not most of whom, have been taught a new religion that there is no such thing as TRUTH in the rules of modern Liberal society.   

It is chic in modern society to be the  Liberal who believes such things.

The gamesmanship now playing in both court and classroom is a violation of the human right in a civilized society  to discover and honor TRUTH.     Judge Kaplan in the Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani  civil “trial” is only the most recent sham pretending   to play and sculpt  truth.    It is a ritual created by  a system of training which  worships  the   god of gamesmanship as the foundation of  the American  justice system.    Contenders are trained to distort,  manipulate, to  cloud over, and if needed, destroy TRUTH.

In this modern game played by attorneys, Barack Hussein Obama,  Eric Holder, and Judge Lewis Kaplan of the skilled class of lawyering liars,  a participant in acts of horrible terrorism causing scores of innocents to be slaughtered to oblivion was deemed “not guilty” of  over 200 charges against him except for one……a tiny bit of  complicity called ‘conspiracy’.   Obama and Holder should never have created this sham.

Every American should know  this fraud…..how were the jurors selected?….to what degree were they chosen for their politics?……one of the most important phases of gamesmanship…….to what degree were they able to read and absorb the 200 plus charges against the accused?  ……why did this administration insist upon a Judge Lewis Kaplan trial?  where  the  search for TRUTH is rarely part of the game. 

Another question,   ”Are   attorneys trained to be liars, or does the duplicity  come from experience?  

For a quick study please review the comments of the defense attorney for the accused after the verdict, for starters.

In a living democracy why is a class of citizens trained to be skilled in the art of deceit and corruption allowed nearly exclusive governance over that democracy’s judicial and political system?     Any citizen is capable of making  decisions as stupid and flaky as our decorated judges and legislators make. 

Judges should be citizens  seeking TRUTH, whether or not they are cloaked.   That advisors of law need to be present where knowledge of laws are vital is a given.  But, judges should not be required to be members of the most dishonest  class trained by   American society, the “law degreed” attorney.

“Truth” is God, I believe much of civilized mankind has claimed in the past.   Why do  we mortals forget so often the vital importance of seeking TRUTH?

This Kaplan court verdict is a shame on America perpetrated by the shame of the politics of president Obama,  a politician elected by a people who had a dream, not a brain.