Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is still attempting to exploit the arrest of two suspected terrorists in Kentucky to push for the use of the military commissions system to try Muslim terror suspects apprehended in the United States.
In a Washington Post op-ed, McConnell offers an argument that takes Attorney General Eric Holder's remarks about the utility of civilian courts completely out of context:
Speaking to a crowd of lawyers in Washington last week, Attorney General Eric Holder made an audacious claim about the war on terrorism. Overlooking the all-volunteer military force that has heroically battled terrorists and insurgents for nearly a decade, our outstanding intelligence and counterterrorism experts, and many others, Holder asserted that America's “most effective terror-fighting weapon” is its civilian court system.
These comments insult those who have served on the front lines, but Holder's clear intent was to justify the Obama administration's two-year misadventure in treating captured terrorists like common criminals. This is evident most recently in Bowling Green, Ky., where two Iraqi nationals who have admitted to targeting American troops in Iraq were arrested last month.
Why does Eric Holder hate the troops? And America? And puppies? The issue here is whether or not civilian courts are an effective tool for incapacitating terrorists--it's no insult to American servicemembers to point out that the federal trial system, in which hundreds of terrorists have been convicted, is more effective than McConnell's preferred alternative. You can literally count the number of military commissions convictions during the same period on one hand. Holder wasn't saying "trials are awesome, the troops suck." McConnell goes onto argue that "the civilian system was never intended to deal with foreign fighters or to gather intelligence in the pursuit of additional terrorists." This is a verifiable falsehood. Civilian law enforcement has always been on the front line of such incidents, from the Tanzania Embassy bombings to the attack on the U.S.S Cole.
What McConnell doesn't say is that trying terror suspects captured on American soil isn't a "two year misadventure" but the standard practice of the U.S. government for almost a decade. Not once did President George W. Bush transfer anyone captured on American soil into the military commissions system, although there were plenty of terrorists convicted in civilian court during his presidency. Not once during that time did McConnell or any other prominent Republican legislator accuse Bush of "treating captured terrorists like common criminals." If McConnell had his way, you'd literally have the U.S. military knocking on Americans' doors and investigating incidents of domestic terrorism--so much for "small government."
As Holder noted in his speech, "not one of these terrorists arrested on American soil has been tried by a military commission. Not by the Obama Administration – and not by the Bush Administration. Not a single one." What McConnell is asking for is a radical change in U.S. policy he never pushed when a Republican president is in office, on the basis of the deeply flawed presumption that any Muslim arrested on suspicion of terrorism is automatically guilty.