Obama declines to take "yes" for an answer on detaining terrorists, Part Two
POWERLINE
By Paul
Yesterday, Jed Babbin reported that White House lawyers are refusing to accept the findings of an inter-agency committee that the Uighur Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay are too dangerous to release inside the U.S. Today, Thomas Joscelyn shows that a contrary finding would not only contradict the "inter-agency" conclusion, but would also be hard to square with the Treasury Department's recent designation of Abdul Haq, the leader of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party ("ETIP"), as a terrorist.
In so designating Abdul Haq, the Treasury Department noted that he is a member of al Qaeda's Shura Council - a position reserved for only key terrorists with close ties to the terror organization. .Abdul Haq is also on the U.N.'s list of persons associated with Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, or the Taliban.
The question then becomes whether (or perhaps to what extent) the 17 Uighur detainees are linked to Abdul Haq. The answer, according to Joscelyn, is that at least ten of the Uighurs (including two who have been transferred to Albania) have openly admitted their ties to Abdul Haq, as well as to Hassan Mahsum, who before he was killed in Waziristan in October 2003, was the leader of ETIP. The admissions came during their testimony at combatant status review tribunals at Guantánamo Bay. Even as the detainees were protesting their general innocence, they admitted that they received training at a camp in Tora Boro that was run by Abdul Haq. One of them testified that when he and his comrades went to the mountains "we were waiting for Abdul Haq, he was in charge of the group. We were waiting for him to come up to give orders or take us somewhere else."
Haq is, in Joscelyn's words, "a violent jihadist who shares al Qaeda's ideology, maintains operational ties to the organization as a member of its Shura Council, and seeks the creation of a radical Islamist state throughout Central and South Asia." Why does the Obama administration want to relocate a a cadre of his trainees to the United States?
Criminalizing Conservatism
By John
Many liberals don't just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail. Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences. President Obama hinted at another step in that direction when he said today that he is open to the idea of bringing criminal charges against the Justice Department lawyers who wrote opinions to the effect that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods could legally be used on al Qaeda detainees. Obama said the question was a complicated one, and the decision will ultimately be made by Attorney General Eric Holder.
The idea of prosecuting a lawyer because a wrote a legal analysis with which the current Attorney General disagrees is so outrageous that I can't believe it would be seriously considered. Still, President Obama and his party may achieve another objective by publicly making this kind of threat: deterring Republicans from serving in public life. For many Republicans considering whether to accept an appointment to government office, the prospect that they may be subjected to criminal prosecution if the next administration is Democratic could well tip the balance in favor of remaining in private life. Link |
