Greg Sargent has found out something very interesting:
The House GOP leadership hopes to force Dems into an awkward vote on the plan to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, a leadership aide tells me. The idea: If the House Dem leadership brings a big scheduled appropriations bill up for a vote this week, Republicans will likely offer a motion calling for a ban on using any Federal funds to transfer KSM and co-conspirators to New York.
“Now that the White House has announced it is ignoring the will of the American people and going ahead with this, the stakes are a lot higher,” the aide says. “Will House Democratic Leadership bring this bill up for a vote this week?”
It’s amazing how much America has changed. Just a year ago if you questioned a decision our Commander in Chief made about the “war on terror”, you got called all kinds of names like: traitor, terrorist sympathizer, America hater, or weak. Of course those were Republicans shouting those names at Democrats. Now that a Democrat is in the White House, the Republicans feel it perfectly fine to question every single decision made by the Commander in Chief.
Something else I have been thinking about with this is how other countries handle terrorists. Take the U.K., who has had their fair share of convictions of terrorists. The U.K. didn’t set up military tribunals or war courts, instead they tried them in their public courts of law and did so successfully. So why can other countries do this but America can’t? It sure seems like there is a lack of confidence in our system of law.
Then we have another question that comes up. Take someone like Rudy Giuliani, who is out blasting this decision. Funny how all of the sudden our courts can’t handle prosecuting terrorists, yet he had no problem with the first World Trade Center bombers got tried and convicted here in the United States. Does Rudy have no confidence in our legal system, a system he spent years working in? Maybe Rudy is putting politics ahead of national security now.
Finally there is a very important question that has been missing from the argument – why didn’t Bush do anything? Bush had years of making decisions, but instead of making them he decided to ignore the detainees at Gitmo. He could have tried and convicted these people by the time he had left office but didn’t. Instead Bush chose to leave the problem for the next President and the Republicans had no problem with that. Of course now that the next President is actually making the “hard” decisions, the Republicans chose to play armchair general. Again – the Republicans don’t care about national security, only playing politics.