Last week in a congressional hearing concerning KSM and other terrorist war criminal’s being tried in a New York City criminal court. Senator Lindsey Graham, questioning Attorney General Eric Holder, asked if he could name one case or precedent in our history where enemy combatants were captured abroad and brought back to the United States to be tried in a civilian criminal court. Holder, The Attorney General of the United States, said “I’ll have to get back to you” Senator Graham cut him off and said “I’ll save you some time… It’s never happened”
The Senator was 1005 correct, in fact, it was the liberal icon FDR himself who set the precedent the other way, the way in which we should be following in this case.
The precedent was set in 1942 when Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered German saboteurs, who were part of Operation Pastorius, where to be tried in a military commission.
Recruited for the operation were eight Germans who had lived in the United States. Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States.
Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydro-electric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America’s plants in Illinois, Tennessee and New York; locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad’s repair shops at Altoona;[1] a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey. They were given a quick course in sabotage techniques, given nearly $175,000 in American money and put aboard two submarines to land on the east coast of the United States.
… Two of the Germans in New York, Dasch and Burger, decided to back out of the mission. Dasch went to Washington, D.C., and turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was dismissed as a crackpot by numerous agents, until he finally dumped his mission’s entire budget of $84,000 on the desk of Assistant Director D.M. Ladd. At this point the defection was taken seriously and Dasch was interrogated for hours.[5] None of the others knew of the betrayal. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested, and all eight were put on trial before a seven-member military commission on specific instructions from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They were charged with 1) violating the law of war; 2) violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy; 3) violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and 4) conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.
Lawyers for the accused, who included Lauson Stone and Kenneth Royall, attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court, but were rebuffed by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin. The trial was held in the Department of Justice building in Washington. All eight defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death.
With extraordinary arrogance, the Obama administration, has ignored time honored precedent in the way we conduct trials for war criminals and are once again showing the same deference to the true nature and motivations of our enemy’s by relegating their acts to simple crimes, not unlike the failures of Clinton Administration.
The argument seems to be that people, like me, want to dress them in a uniform and hold them accountable in a military court, as if somehow these military trials have a certain dignity to them and we would be dignifying them and granting them status they don’t deserve.
My response is nice try… A for effort here but that argument is ridiculous on many levels but mostly it shows and incredible and fundamental lack of understating of whom are enemies are and what their agenda is. It’s not only naïve but extremely ignorant to think that these acts weren’t acts of war!
Furthermore, my answer is Yes! If the alternative to wrapping these war criminals in the U.S. Constitution and granting them the right’s of U.S. citizens is so-called dressing them in a uniform and trying them in a military court… I’m all for it!!!
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