Eric Holder's view on terrorist detainees

Via BLACKFIVE:

My main objection to Obama all along has been a lack of trust in his seriousness about our enemies and them methods we use to fight them. He has called for closing Gitmo, a decent PR move but a nightmare scenario for those who don't believe terrorists should be treated as citizens. Here are some thoughts on the status of al Qaeda jagoffs from Obama's choice for Attorney General.

Via JG in the Corner.....Eric Holder on CNN in 2002:

One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention that you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people.
It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war. If, for instance, Mohamed Atta had survived the attack on the World Trade Center, would we now be calling him a prisoner of war? I think not. Should Zacarias Moussaoui be called a prisoner of war? Again, I think not.

That, from Obama's pick for Attorney General, I find to be fascinating, especially in light of this Newsweek piece:

He should not be stampeded into appeasing his global constituencies on Guantánamo Bay.

What should Barack Obama do with the 250 men who are still locked up in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp? Of the many problems the new president will face, this is one of the most difficult, and one he must get right. Along with it, he must answer equally tough questions about how his administration will deal with suspected terrorists in the future: Where will they be held and what legal rights will they have? Which interrogation methods will President Obama allow—and which will he forbid?

He made some of the answers to these questions clear in his campaign promises, and he would be wise to announce his intentions on or before Inauguration Day. Obama should and probably will renounce all brutal interrogation methods, not just those that the Bush administration defines as torture. He should and probably will discontinue or overhaul the widely derided and largely failed system of "military commissions" that President Bush created in 2001 to try suspected terrorists for war crimes. And he should and probably will announce a detailed plan to close Guantánamo, possibly within a year.

...

But such steps alone may well fall short of expectations around the world and in the Democratic Party's liberal base. Even Bush has said that he wanted to close Guantánamo and denied that he sanctioned torture. Obama's global constituency and the human-rights community want him to make a clean break with Bush by banning even moderately coercive interrogation methods that may (or may not) violate international law against "humiliating and degrading treatment." They also want him immediately to abolish—not just move —the system of detention-without-charges that Guantánamo represents.

Obama should not be stampeded into taking those steps without careful deliberation. (Voters won't rush him. Only 29 percent of respondents in a recent Quinnipiac poll favored closing the prison; 44 percent were opposed.) Both policy and politics argue against deciding whether to ban moderately coercive methods until Obama and his subordinates have had time to study the disputed evidence on the effectiveness of these techniques—and until the president has sought bipartisan support (including that of John McCain) in Congress.

My prediction is that Obama won't do much at all with Gitmo in the near term for a variety of reasons.  He's been exposed now to the threat that is jihadism.  He has or soon will be exposed to the truth concerning  the conditions these detainees are held in.  He'll come around to the idea that some interrogation is necessary to save American lives.

Let's wait and see.

Patiently.

Comments

[Antimedia]

Where were these a**holes when Bush was President? Now, all of a sudden, the media doesn't think Bush's ideas were so bad after all? Yet they won't even give him credit?

And these are the a**holes who shopped the Koran in the toilet story? What a bunch of despicable jerks!

[tim aka The Godless Heathent]

Obama will come around to admitting that ‘This is not the Gitmo that I knew’.

Amazing how many in less than a month Obama seems to realize that a few of those “Failed Policies of the Last Eight Years’ are nothing close to that.

Pres. Bush’s legacy is already on good footing.