Editor’s Note: A lot of you guys have heard Ken speak. He spoke at the RedState Gathering in Atlanta. We absolutely need him in office. You can contribute to him here –Erick.

According to the Washington Post, the Obama Administration is pushing to transfer some of the terrorist detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into the Commonwealth of Virginia for trial in a U.S. federal criminal court. (See Daily Virginia Roundup, The Washington Post, 08/04/09; Security Worries in the Suburbs, The Washington Post, 03/25/09) The Post has speculated that these detainees may be tried in the federal courts in Alexandria. However, regardless of exactly where in Virginia these detainees end up, I am strongly opposed to the idea of bringing any of these terrorists into the Commonwealth, and even more strongly opposed to the very concept of using criminal prosecution to fight the War Against Terrorism. I believe this Administration plan, if implemented, would: ignore the benefit of using Guantanamo Bay; impede our conduct in that war; be cost-prohibitive to our government and physically dangerous to our citizenry; be largely ineffective in punishing these terrorists; and be totally unprecedented in U.S. history. And as Attorney General of Virginia, I promise that I will do all that I can to stop the Administration from implementing this plan.

First of all, part of the benefit of having a facility such as Guantanamo Bay is to hold people such as terrorist detainees. It is the ideal location. It is isolated from civilian populations and it is impossible to escape from.

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Those wondering how long it would take for the first act of terrorism to be perpetrated on American soil under President Barack Obama did not have to wait long. The murder of a U.S. military recruiter by a Muslim convert in Arkansas yesterday marks the return of the war on terror to America after just four months of the new Administration’s systematic dismantling of the policies and programs that kept the nation safe for over seven years under the Bush Administration.

Some may take issue with that characterization, noting the slaying of abortionist George Tiller by an apparently militant domestic terrorist on Sunday. President Obama certainly was quick to condemn that killing; and his Administration quick to take action to protect other abortion providers. Tiller’s murderer, though a cold-blooded killer, is not a terrorist of the kind that the United States has been fighting since the September 11th attacks. If every murderer were a terrorist, the United States would have to invade most liberal-run cities to put down the violence.

Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, formerly Carlos Bledsoe, is, however, exactly the kind of terrorist that has been prevented from carrying out acts of violence against Americans, until now. Still, the president has not made a statement about the killing.

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Where demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders — namely, highly secure prisons that ensure the public safety.

President Barack Obama, May 21, 2009

Authorities in New York have discovered that the four alleged terrorists arrested last week while planning to blow up a synagogue and shoot down a U.S. military plane were all converted to Islam while in prison.  The four were attendees at a Newburgh, NY, mosque, where Imam Salahuddin Muhammad is the spiritual leader.  Muhammad also serves as a Muslim prison chaplain.

The revelation comes just two days after President Obama uttered the words above, announcing his plan to bring some of the terrorist detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay into the United States to be held in the U.S. prison system.  The president assures that no one has ever escaped from one of the federal Supermax prisons.  But as the case of the New York terror cell demonstrates, escape is not the only issue.

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It is fitting that President Barack Obama’s much-hyped and anticipated speech on his plan for the detainees currently held at Gunatanamo Bay was delivered in the rotunda of the National Archives building.  Throughout his speech, the argumemts of a petulant child stubbornly refusing to accept any responsibility for his actions could be heard echoing around the marble hall. The president’s speech was not courageous, uplifting, or forward looking. It was a small speech, especially in comparison to former vice president Dick Cheney’s address immediately after, and revealed the true stature of the man giving it.

President Obama is the master of the political trick of decrying a given act while engaging in it. Throughout this speech, Obama made overtures to looking ahead all the while dwelling on the past. He said he did not want to engage in refighting the battles of the last eight years over enhanced interrogations and Guantanamo Bay, then proceeded to do just that, explicitly and implicitly criticizing decisions of the Bush Administration as misguided, illegitimate, and “hasty.”

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Michele Flournoy, President Barack Obama’s newly minted Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, may have unwittingly given a preview of Obama’s big speech on the fate of terrorists currently held at Guantanamo Bay, when she spoke after the Senate overwhelmingly voted to strip funding for implementing the closure from the Administration’s supplemental budget request for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Flournoy essentially said that members of Congress who object to the terrorists being brought into their districts and states will just have to get over it.

[Flournoy] says members of Congress need to remember that closing the stigmatized prison in Cuba will mean hard choices for everyone. [...]

[She] says it’s unrealistic to think that no detainees will come to the U.S., and that the U.S. can’t ask allies to take detainees while refusing to take on the same burden.

Without singling anyone out, Flournoy said lawmakers need to think more “strategically.”

The Pentagon says Guantanamo terrorists are coming to the United States, so that Europe will feel better.  Is this the Obama Administration’s plan?  And will the president say so clearly in his speech today?

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GTMO detainees could be released into the United States as early as next week.

Human Events has the details.

Rasmussen finds 58% of Americans believe the Obama administration’s recent release of CIA memos endangers the national security of the United States.

Sizable majorities of Republicans and unaffiliated voters say the release of the CIA memos about the interrogations hurts national security. Democrats are evenly divided on whether the release hurt national security or helped the image of the United States abroad.

Other findings:

• Americans don’t want an investigation of how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects. Only 28% think the Obama administration should do any further investigating of how the Bush administration treated terrorism suspects, 58% are opposed. Democrats are evenly divided over whether further investigation is necessary. Seventy-seven percent of Republicans and 62% of voters not affiliated with either major party are against more investigating.

• Just 42% of all voters say terrorism suspects were tortured by the United States, unchanged from October 2007. Most Democrats (54%) and a plurality of unaffiliated voters (46%) believe the United States did torture terrorism suspects. Fifty-five percent (55%) of Republican voters do not believe torture was used.

No wonder President Obama is now backing away from investigating the Bush Administration.

The faux outrage over “torture” during the Bush War on Terror (I refer to it as the “Bush” war because, under Obama, we’re apparently replacing the “Global War on Terror” with the “Multiple-Day Standoff on Man-Caused Disasters”) is no more becoming of the left now than it was two, three, or four years ago.

Co-opting the word “torture” to include methods far less offensive than the majority of interrogation techniques I underwent in military SERE training isn’t a victory for moralists and humanitarians in any form; rather, it’s an Orwellian perversion of a word that once had meaning by those who have spent the last eight years on constant lookout for some greviance to hold against a president whose mere existence they resented.

The sad fact is, by co-opting the word “torture” and using it to describe activities going on at Gitmo, Bagram, and elsewhere, these faux-humanitarians have left us with no word to use to describe those activities which used to be classified as torture, like beheading captives on video, hanging people from meat hooks, drilling out eyeballs, using electric current to cause severe pain and physical damage, and cutting off limbs.

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The Somali “pirates” are at it again, and this time they’ve provided the United States with that foreign policy crisis that VPOTUS Biden predicted would occur.  The pirates terrorists are now targeting US-flagged and manned vessels, and that puts our Eunuch-in-Chief in a position where he must (heaven forbid) make a real decision.  To no one’s surprise, he and his administration have decided to play nicey with the terrorists and negotiate with them.

The FBI sent in hostage negotiators and is investigating the Somali pirates, raising the possibility of federal charges against the men if they are captured.  But Obama has remained silent on the standoff so far.

“Obama has remained silent”.  Somehow I have this vision of him in his closet in a fetal position with his blanky and his binky (apologies to TOTUS), rocking back and forth and calling for his mommy because he is utterly incapable of dealing with a real crisis.

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UPDATE: The ‘money quote’ from SCOTUSBLOG:

The brief was another indication that, at least so far, the new Administration is not moving to make a wide-ranging break with detention policies of the former Bush Administration.

The utopian Left, which saw in the Rorshach that was candidate Barack Obama just what they wanted to see (rather than anything tangible or lasting) suffered yet another reality-based blow yesterday with the new administration’s claim in federal court that Guantanamo Bay detainees — also known as terrorists who would brutally murder every one of their Leftist defenders without breaking a sweat or losing their smiles — “do not have due process rights” afforded to Americans or civilized human beings as a whole.

According to SCOTUSBLOG:

The Obama Administration, taking its first position in a federal court on claims of torture of Guantanamo Bay detainees, urged the D.C. Circuit Court on Thursday to reject a lawsuit by four Britons formerly held there. In addition, the new filing argued that a recent appeals court ruling makes clear that “aliens held at Guantanamo do not have due process rights.”

Moreover, the document called for a sweeping ban on lawsuits against U.S. military officials, claiming constitutional violations by such officials. Allowing such lawsuits “for actions taken with respect to aliens during wartime,” it said, “would enmesh the courts in military, national security, and foreign affairs matters that are the exclusive province of the political branches.”

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On Thursday, President Obama directed the closing of the terrorist detention center
in Guantanamo Bay, but not for a year.

Senator McCain thinks Obama was too hasty and failed to consider where the terrorists detained at Guantanamo will go:

“So, the easy part, in all due respect, is to say we’re going to close Guantanamo,” McCain said. “Then I think I would have said where they were going to be taken. Because you’re going to run into a NIMBY [not in my backyard] problem here in the United States of America.”

Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports that Obama’s order to close the terrorist prison sounds dramatic and unequivocal, but “experts predict that American policy towards detainees could remain for months or even years pretty close to what it was as President Bush left office.”

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…Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, later to be brutally beheaded by his captors with the video proudly posted on the Internet for the world to see.

The terrorists who committed this act, were they to be captured today under the Obama Administration’s policies, would be brought to the mainland United States for trial in civilian courts, be granted the rights of habeas corpus and the right to remain silent, could not be subjected to any coercive interrogation practices, and would have the right to see all evidence against them, as well as cross examine their accusers.

Rest in peace, Daniel.