Holder At War

National Review: In The Attorney General's Office, Radical Is As Radical Does

(National Review Online)  This column was written by Andrew C. McCarthy.

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There was no reason to worry about that stemwinder Eric Holder delivered at the American Constitution Society last June. Sure, he had claimed that Bush national-security measures - the ones that staved off another 9/11 for seven years - were “needlessly abusive and unlawful practices” that “made us less, rather than more, safe.” And, okay, he did rail about “torture,” “secret electronic surveillance,” and measures that “denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants.” And, yes, the crowd did squeal with delight when he inveighed, “We owe the American people a reckoning.” But that was just a bunch of red meat for lefty lawyers, right? No need to take it seriously.

And surely there was no need to fret over those terrorist pardons on Holder’s watch: not the FALN thugs, whose organization carried out more than 130 bombings in the United States; and not the two Weather Underground bombers, who were allowed to skip out of their combined century of jail time for waging war against “Amerika.” That was all Clinton, Holder fans insisted. Holder’s not a pol, he’s a law-enforcement pro. He gets the terrorist threat - why, just look at his résumé.

The new attorney general would understand that “we are at war,” as he put it during his confirmation testimony. “To be honest,” Holder explained, he believed that “our nation didn’t realize that we were at war when, in fact, we were.” On reflection, when he “look[ed] back” at his tenure helping run the Clinton Justice Department - when he considered “the embassy bombings, the bombing of the Cole” - Holder had to admit that “we as a nation should have realized that, at that point, we were at war. We should not have waited until September the 11th of 2001 to make that determination.” Things are different now, though. Holder had come to appreciate that there are dangerous terrorists out there who mean real harm to Americans. He grasped, he said, that those terrorists have to be stopped and captured - even if it means detaining them without trial.

It was an effective performance - emphasis on performance.

Holder got the job, and that turned out to be a good day for Binyam Mohammed. He was the would-be accomplice of would-be “dirty bomber” (and now convicted terrorist) José Padilla. Mohammed planned to carry out mass-murder attacks in American cities. A succession of three Bush-era attorneys general kept him locked up in accordance with the laws of war, a practice the Supreme Court reaffirmed in its 2004 Hamdi decision. Moreover, military prosecutors believed they had a strong war-crimes case. But Mohammed will not be tried by the military, or by Holder’s department. Of course, declining to try him would not be a big deal as long as Mohammed remained incarcerated. After all, as Holder solemnly declared to the Senate.

"If we have a basis to determine that a person is dangerous, and we have evidence that would demonstrate that that person is dangerous, I don't think that, given the Supreme Court decision in Hamdi, and the responsibility that I have as attorney [general] of the United States, should I be confirmed, for the safety of this nation, that that is a person who we can release."

Right. We have plenty of basis and evidence that Mohammed is dangerous. But Holder’s sense of “responsibility . . . as attorney general . . . for the safety of this nation” did not stop him from agreeing to Mohammed’s release and transfer to England - where he now plots freely while on the British dole.

Naturally, having discerned that all the tough talk was just that, talk, British authorities are back on the administration’s doorstep, demanding the release of Shaker Aamer. He’s a bin Laden confidant who trained aspiring terrorists at al-Qaeda camps, met with shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and traveled widely in the United States - meeting with embedded terrorists and sharing an apartment with Zacarias Moussaoui (convicted in 2006 for his complicity in the 9/11 plot). Anyone want to bet how that gets resolved?

Meantime, at a press briefing two weeks ago, Holder said he’d been pondering the shuttering of Guantanamo Bay - which is to say, the emerging plan to honor the closure commitment Obama made to the Left simply by springing most of the remaining 240 or so detainees, several of whom are suing the United States courtesy of the free legal help they’ve gotten over the last several years from Holder’s former law firm. Some of these captives, Holder observed, would need to be released in the United States, the better to encourage other nations to join Adopt-a-Binyam.

The detainees, it bears remembering, are aliens affiliated with the global jihad. In the main, they are associated with terrorist organizations and have received paramilitary training. Under federal law, both terror-group membership and terrorist training are grounds for excluding aliens from the United States. That law was enacted in 2005 because of the war Holder says he now realizes we’ve been in for over a decade. It was enacted because paramilitary courses factored into all those terrorist attacks from the 1990s that “we as a nation” missed the significance of. Holder hasn’t explained how turning trained jihadists loose on the infidels that they were training to kill is consistent with his new war mentality (a war in which, at his direction, we no longer call enemy combatants “enemy combatants”). Nor is it clear how this comports with his “responsibility . . . for the safety of this nation” and his obligation to enforce U.S. statutes.

When he is not bravely lecturing Americans about their cowardice on race, our attorney general is running roughshod over his Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) - and shamefully politicizing his Solicitor General’s Office - in order to uphold patently unconstitutional legislation, the D.C. Voting Rights Act, that hasn’t even been enacted yet. One might have thought, given his purported war epiphany, that Holder would prioritize the valid laws designed to protect Americans from jihadists over the invalid non-laws designed to protect Democrats from losing their congressional majority.

Nevertheless, these detainee hijinks may be the least of our problems with this Marc Rich wheel-greaser who categorically promised the Senate, “The attempt to politicize the department will not be tolerated should I become attorney general of the United States.” Holder’s political hackery now extends to educating our enemies and laying the groundwork for foreign prosecutions of Bush officials (think of it as outsourcing the “reckoning”) -if that’s what it takes, as the New York Times put it, “to distance the new administration from the most controversial policies of the Bush years.”

Holder has already declassified and made public several Bush OLC memoranda regarding post-9/11 defense measures. (By contrast, he is refusing to disclose his own OLC’s reasoning that the D.C. Voting Rights bill is unconstitutional.) Such disclosures badly compromise the Justice Department’s interest in promoting sound, apolitical advice. To this point, though, they’ve been limited to the Bush OLC’s legal theorizing, and thus of little practical utility to our enemies. Now, however, Holder apparently is pushing for the release of classified memos that discuss actual interrogation methods.

For all the bombast about detainee abuse since the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004, only waterboarding has been publicly acknowledged by the intelligence community. The CIA’s remaining enhanced techniques remain classified. As the Times elaborates, top current and former intelligence officials are energetically lobbying to keep it that way.

They are being beaten back, however, by Holder and his staffers. Carrying the water for congressional Democrats beholden to the antiwar Left, they would release the memos on the theory that, since President Obama has limited coercion to the benign tactics in the Army Field Manual (AFM), enhanced measures are no longer authorized; thus, the argument goes, there can be no harm in exposing them.

From a national-security perspective, this is absurd. The administration is supposedly studying whether, in emergency circumstances, methods outside the AFM should be authorized. If that is true, it is by no means clear that some of those methods have outlived their usefulness. But even if that were not the case, we know that al-Qaeda and other accomplished terror groups teach interrogation resistance - just as our military subjects some of its own members to waterboarding (despite claims that it is torture) for counter-interrogation training. If we understand we are at war, why would we help our enemies? The point of these intelligence interrogations is to thwart terrorist attacks and save lives. Why would we describe for terrorists the enhanced tactics we have used, knowing they will train against those tactics - secure in the knowledge that, by learning to resist them, they will perfect their ability to defeat the milder methods we are using?

As Holder well knows, tactics do not have to be disclosed in order to ensure that we are behaving humanely. Acting in good faith and with appropriate congressional review, legal and intelligence officials can strike a balance absent a public airing that can only make our enemies more efficient at killing us.

The public airing is strictly about politics. It is about satisfying the insatiable Bush-haters Holder stirred at the American Constitution Society. It is about increasing the likelihood of foreign indictments against Bush officials, to give the Left its “reckoning” while formally honoring the commitment Holder gave Republican senators not to pursue the case himself.

The Binyam Mohammeds go free, while dedicated Americans, who worked night and day to keep this country safe, edge closer to legal peril. Welcome to Holder at War.

More CBS News Coverage Of Eric Holder

National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

[delfmast]

WastingtonDC: The innumerable unsung surviving victims of federal prosecutor's misconduct should hold a national reunion/fund raising convention, to get the litigation rolling. A first step must be to return Uncle Ted to his lifetime Senate seat, with a few billion dollars actual and punitive damages, from several dozen to a hundred or two political criminals, bureaucrats, and their hangers on. The class action suit, for a long list of other patriots, statesmen, soldiers, sailors, tailors and spies, can be delayed until after the illegal Alaskan election can be declared null and void by the Governor of Alaska. Then, Alaska's serving governor can appoint a Senator to replace the unfortunate Democratic Senator in Uncle Ted's seat, whose victory is fatally tainted, regardless of whether he was personally involved in the conspiracy to lynch Senator Stevens. His tenure must therefore be ended, in accordance with the law's of Alaska, and America. A fund raising effort could be put together, or the recruitment of a top conservative law firm, on speculation, to bring a taste of the penury they planned for Alaska's favorite son, by litigation against each and every lawyer, administrator, clerk, lawman, anybody and everybody, involved in this travesty of justice, or plain political crime spree. The illegal prosecutor's lynching, of Alaska's answer to Senator Byrd of West Virginia must not go unpunished. The tainted election must be voided, ASAP. The Independent Byrd, the other most successful "bring home the bacon" Senator, most famous for serving the needs/wants/fantasies of "them that brung him to the Senate" and the rest be damned, is a careful man, and he is on the right, (left) side of the disloyal majority, so he may be safe, for now. On the other hand, Murtha of PA is targeted heavily, and the entire world is raging about Barney Frank and Chris Dodd driving the world's economy off a cliff, with most emphasis, and conservative glee, on Dodd's gifts from Tony, of Country Wide, and an expensive Irish Island cottage from some friend of a convicted criminal pardoned by the HilBillery Co-Presidents, as they allegedly gathered up any loose dishes, furniture, and all the computer "W's" and decamped the White House. Did Dodd conspire with DOJ co-conspirators, to forward that last minute pardon. Enraged American taxpayers would like to know, right now. While we would love to have a special prosecutor appointed to figure out Dodd's gifts, which appear to be far more egregiously criminal than any attributed to Uncle Ted, we are becoming, precisely, now, as these words are written, afraid that the new Attorney General is callously reversing a crime that he would, in less dangerous circumstance, have rewarded with promotions for the perpetrators, and champagne lunches for their staffs. Is it possible, that he is throwing a man who served most of his life in the Senatorial Club, regardless of Uncle Ted's guilt or innocence, as a bone, to the raging American public, and the Republican resurgence leaders, to quiet, on the cheap, the needed congressional ethics (yes, we know it is a shameful joke) response, and the required DOJ prosecutor's response, to the incredible, and apparently criminal lapses of Senator Dodd, and perhaps Mr. Murtha. If the GOP that is "ROTFLTAO" (rolling on the floor laughing their arses off), simply refuse to accept the hapless DOJ's bribe/gift, even with the reduction of the disloyal majorities numbers, when Alaska's governor voids the election, and reappoints Uncle Ted to serve out the term, what will DOJ do. Will the embarrassed DOJ then go and dig up the GOP's other, more important victims, convicted during the renegade DOJ liberal's electioneering, like the Texas crowd that is hovering in the wings, or even those quietly serving out their terms in various Federal Tennis Club Prisons. The embarrassing situation could possibly be more delicious for conservatives, but that would require a new disclosure, perhaps one revealing something like, for instance, if Barney Frank could be shown to have, as the female FBI agent is alleged to have had, an inappropriate personal relationship with one or another of the men involved in producing the catastrophic destruction that sub-prime, or liars loans, Frank's "roll the dice a little bit" efforts, allowed, encouraged, and forced into existence. Did Barney have personal reasons to protect his friends in Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, or even Country Wide, (friends of Tony)? I have not had a better laugh since I was driving exhausted, one of a hundred trips to the left coast, (California), from the Right Coast, and heard, at 3:00 AM, the first radio broadcast of the nature and extent of HilBillery's inappropriate relationships with interns, volunteers, et al. Drink, Drink to the convicted already, Hooray for the next indicted!

[dronemonk]

"...staved off another 9/11 for seven years..."

Such nonsense. Reads like propaganda from someone desperate to control the debate in these sadly proto fascist end days of the Republic.

[KazooD]

Just another right wing hack trying to defend torture. Pathetic.

[mattgersz]

I laugh my butt off when the NRO calls someone a radical. Look in the mirror, guys.

[trillion1]

And the rightwingnuts can't understand why American's and the world are passing them by?

[TerryConspiracy]

"We have plenty of basis and evidence that Mohammed is dangerous"

After you subtract the "evidence" that was obtained through the use of torture, what is left ?

Hearsay & racial profiling, no doubt.

President Obama's administration of "change", is losing credibility fast !

[bobbyduck1]

NRO publishes the worst right-wing, neo-whack nutjob propoganda that finds its way to the mains-stream media.

The question is, why does CBS publish it?

Utter garbage not worthy of reading!

[ubrew12]

NRO: We have plenty of basis and evidence that Mohammed is dangerous"

You always have. You always do. You never bring it to a court of law. This gives you the advantage of perpetually being able to claim: "We have plenty of basis and evidence that Mohammed is dangerous"

Put up or shut up NRO. The people recognize that continually claiming an 'imminent threat' is the easiest way to fleece them. Whats amazing is, given the last 8 years, that you're still publishing. I mean, how is it possible that you guys are still listened to, after what you've pulled on America the last eight years???

[Non-Sequitur]

The paranoia of the cowardly right wing chest puffers is absolutely stunning. War mongers who have never been to war but insist they know better. They invite the torture and blasphemy we've experienced the last 8 miserable years under their misrule without apology... nay, they're proud of the shame they've brought upon us and wear it like a chest full of medals they've somehow earned. This Godless, God cloaked crowd of Satan's spawn would destroy America from within should we allow their evil influence to continue. Their fear and hate is palatable... because that's all they have... that's their whole game. Scare the hell out of everyone and their ruthlessness looks like a gift rather than the curse it is. As long as we're poopin' our pants, they have us under control... God forbid if we start thinking for ourselves and actually notice the mess they made of this country. The Republican party is dead... they just don't know it yet. Their attempts at appearing relevant are pathetic at best, absolutely insane at worst (i.e. their alternative 'budget' and their obstructionism). As an ex-republican, I can only stand here and shake my head in disgust of what the party I knew and loved has become. A radically right wing shrill and pathetic voice (wolf!) in the distance... fading more and more with every inane thing that comes out of their irrelevant mouths. I'm not a liberal, but I have a lot more in common with them than the barbarians who are the republican party today. Get a grip, morons... you gutted out your 'base' by bedding down with the religious wackos. Figure it out.

[sjc_1]

"...staved off another 9/11 for seven years..."

NRO is classical right wing spin. It is trying to prove a negative again.
This is like saying the cold war prevented World War Three. Or that Reagan's
wasteful spending on the Pentagon brought down a rusting and collapsing Soviet Union. If they can get enough people to believe that then there will be no end to what mind control they will try next.