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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You may recall that during the Bush administration and the Presidential campaign, Gizmodo was constantly harping on wiretaps of terrorists. Specifically, Gizmodo claimed that the Bush-era program constituted “domestic spying,” that telecommunications firms spied as well, and that they ‘won’ out over the American people on the matter.

They were practically in hysterics, hiding under sheets and crying into a camera “Leave the phones alone, Bushitler” over the matter.

So imagine my surprise when I find out today that when Nokia is being protested for taking part in a genuine domestic spying program of the Iranian Islamofascist regime, they don’t care. It’s not even worth a post. It’s so unimportant they go out of their way to say they didn’t post on it.

So, to recap: American firms aiding the US government in spying on calls between foreign-based terrorists and their US-based cells: a crime for which they must not get immunity. Foreign firm aiding the Iranian government in oppressing the opposition: “Nokia’s role here seems to be the same as a car company’s role in a drunk-driving incident.”

Clearly the signal here is that the Iranians just don’t really need rights, unless they’re terrorists plotting attacks against Americans. After all, they’re only foreign Muslims. They don’t even have a European complexion. Gawker must think they’re barely even people, which is why they opposed liberating brown-skinned Muslims from Saddam Hussein, and they oppose brown-skinned Muslims from liberating themselves from the Islamic Revolution.

Though it falls outside his original target of being within 100 days of taking office, President Barack Obama is keeping a pre-inauguration promise by “mak[ing] a major speech from an Islamic capital” this week in Cairo, Egypt.

Obama made what was considered by many to be the safest (and most “obvious”) choice in selecting Cairo for his “high-profile speech that would seek to mend rifts between the United States and the broader Muslim world.” Unfortunately, by deciding to play it safe, a president whose life to this point has revolved around an obsession with being “historic” missed out on a truly historic opportunity.

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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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Despite taking place in the Information Age, very few of the heroic exploits of American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines since September 11, 2001, have made their way into the living rooms of ordinary Americans — at least in any lasting way.

Whether this is the result of changing values among the American people, the general population’s perpetually dwindling attention span, or because there are so many things closer to home our nation is choosing to focus on instead of our service men and women’s gallant deeds and efforts (whether that be a rocky national economy or the latest season of American Idol), the fact is this generation has failed to identify and treasure its incarnations of historic military heroes like Audie Murphy, Jimmy Doolittle, Pappy Boyington, Bill Pitsenbarger, Bud Day, and countless others.

This disappointing reality is not unique to the current decade. Who, for example, can name the most recent pre-global war on terror (GWOT) recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor? The names of Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon — two Army special operations sergeants who received the nation’s highest award for their heroic actions in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 — are utterly foreign to the vast majority of the same American population that can name the latest movie star to file for divorce, the latest starlet to have borne a child out of wedlock, or the latest teen sensation to enter alcohol rehab.

Part of the problem is a lack of reporting on stories of true heroism among the men and women serving this country in war zones around the world. After all, how can people know of the deeds being done by our best and brightest if the news media — whose sole raison d’être is to report on deeds and events — doesn’t the job it exists to do?

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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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Nancy Pelosi made a surprise trip to Baghdad yesterday. And according to Alsumaria, she tried to rewrite the history of the debate over the U.S. role in Iraq:

“The SOFA agreement is one that agreed between our two countries and as many of you know, I’m very opposed to the initiation of hostilities in Iraq and to this war in general. But when … once we came here, it was clear that our departure would have to be something mutually agreed upon between the Iraqi government and the government of the US. So, I can’t speak what is the attitude in Iraq, I do not know that this is the plan that has been agreed upon and we want to know that”, Pelosi said.

If Pelosi truly said what is described here, I only hope I can find the reaction from her Iraqi counterparts. It would be nothing more than a breathtaking lie for her to claim that it was ever her priority to ensure that Iraq and the U.S. were on the same page with regard to a withdrawal from Iraq. Rather, Pelosi’s one overriding priority has been to milk the conflict for all it’s worth, politically.

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The American people have good reason to question the leadership qualities of the sunshine patriots of the Democratic party - those whose views on national security are wholly dictated by the mood of the times. They clearly include people like Nancy Pelosi, who was repeatedly briefed on the methods for interrogating detainees, but never raised any concerns she may have had. She was content to keep her thoughts to herself, until the memories of 9/11 had largely faded away, and second-guessing come into vogue.

The Washington Times points out that Pelosi’s frequent nemesis Jane Harman raised questions and aired her concerns at a time when doing so might have been politically costly:

Rep. Jane Harman, facing a likely primary challenge from the left flank of the Democratic Party, was one of the only lawmakers in 2003 to challenge the CIA’s program of harsh interrogations, according to a little-noticed letter to the CIA that was declassified last year.

The California Democrat’s position contrasts with that of a longtime colleague and rival, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Mrs. Pelosi has in the past two weeks said she was powerless to stop the interrogation program, which critics say included torture, and that she was never told that the program was actually being implemented…

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Yesterday we learned that Congress’s most powerful appropriator has decided not to grant President Obama the funds he requested to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo. Today Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey explained why:

“I personally favor what the administration’s talking about doing, but so far as we can tell there is yet no concrete program for that,” Obey said ahead of his panel’s markup of the $94.2 billion supplemental Thursday. “And while I don’t mind defending a concrete program, I’m not much interested in wasting my energy defending a theoretical program.”

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Eric Holder, President Obama’s Attorney General, has shamelessly adopted the tactics of the disgraced prosecutors of Senator Stevens.

Holder has now released 11 formerly classified legal memoranda. These cherry picked legal opinions have been seized upon by left-wing extremists to call for prosecutions of those involved in interrogations of terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.” The terrorist has also admitted involvement in some 30 other terror plots.

The left’s call for the political retribution of show trials over a disagreement over War On Terror policy was given a green light this week by President Obama.

Like the Stevens’ prosecutors, Holder didn’t bother releasing documents that could be used to defend the War on Terror policies the left, Holder and Obama now find so abhorrent. Former vice president Cheney called for the Obama Administration to release the exculpatory files as well.

Holder, to his great discredit, claims he isn’t aware of memos Cheney says should now be released. Watch the following exchange between Holder and Congressman Frank Wolf:

As Wolf said, Holder has an “obligation to release the rest of the memos.” Holder’s obfuscation that he is “not familiar with those memos,” that he has “not seen them,” and that he doesn’t “know
that they exist,” simply does not cut it.

Holder, having released the documents he and the left find so damning, must find and release the documents which Cheney says will detail the valuable intelligence gained from the use of the now objectionable policies. Holder’s failure to do so would be no different than what was done by the prosecutors, or is that persecutors, of Senator Stevens.

The Washington Post reports that Defense Secretary Robert Gates broke with CIA Director Leon Panetta, and four past CIA Directors from Republican and Democratic administrations, to counsel President Barack Obama to release selected CIA memos describing enhanced interrogation techniques used to extract information from captured terrorists. His reason? It must have been a good one.

Robert M. Gates indicates that he supported the release of sensitive memos on detainee interrogation methods last week because he viewed their ultimate release as inevitable.

Reveal secrets before they are leaked? Interesting philosophy. It leaves just one question, though. Why have any secrets at all?

Let’s see everything Mr. Secretary. Troop movements, battle plans, weapons systems, intelligence assets, names of covert agents, all of it. It’s all bound to be disclosed someday anyhow, right? Might as well just get it out there now. No need to actually protect sensitive national security information. America should just dump all of its secrets out in the open and hope that no damage results. After all, in the age of Obama, hope is the policy and our protection.

Now that Barack Obama has opened the door to a ‘Truth Commission’ designed to embarrass Bush Administration appointees and score political points, Nancy Pelosi is trying to throw the door wide open:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pressed the case for creation of a special “truth commission” to investigate the interrogation of terror suspects during the Bush administration.

The California Democrat said several House committees already are examining the issue amid concerns that brutal tactics were used. But in a roundtable meeting Wednesday with reporters, she suggested “it might be further useful to have such a commission so that it removes all doubt that how we protect the American people is in a values-based way.”

If Democrats really want to kick up this anthill, they might want to remind themselves what happened the last time they convened a series of show trials designed to embarrass a Republican president over foreign policy questions. (Sorry this is purely audio; if someone has an equally good video clip, I’ll trade this one out):

Do Democrats really believe that the American people will become angry at the way the Bush administration handled detainees in the War on Terror? It’s more likely that such an investigation will anger the political center of this country, and convince them both that America has not treated detainees badly, and that Obama is going too far in rolling back Bush’s policies.

Are Democrats so eager to overplay their hand that they’re willing to risk turning an obscure DoJ lawyer into the next Oliver North?

Kirsten Gillibrand broke the traditional GOP hold on New York’s 20th Congressional district by making a name for herself as a conservative Democrat. When local Democrats nominated Scott Murphy in the race to succeed her, they said they did so because Murphy was cut from the same cloth. But Scott Murphy clearly hasn’t learned anything from the shared experience of New Yorkers about the war on terror:

Murphy opposes the death penalty for terrorists because it’s too expensive to execute them. He apparently also wants to make sure that when people like the 9-11 hijackers are captured, they get a fair trial where we are certain of their guilt before we lock them away.

These are not the views of a conservative Democrat, or of a Democrat who has learned the lessons of 9-11. Murphy’s views sound more like an old-line liberal in the mold of Mario Cuomo: legalistic and out-of-touch with reality. It’s surprising that someone who worked on Wall Street for years would demonstrate such a lack of sensitivity to the concerns of New Yorkers about terrorism. But perhaps he was still living in Missouri when New York was attacked; his bio has changed several times, so it’s hard to tell.

This surprising candor is so noteworthy that I almost want to let it stand alone, but I also need to mention that Murphy thinks the Obama-Reid-Pelosi debt spending was so gosh-darned wonderful that he would have supported it even knowing that it had a loophole for AIG bonuses in it.

That’s right: Murphy opposes the death penalty for terrorists because it’s too expensive, but he supports a $1.1 trillion debt spending bill… even one with an AIG carveout:

Not to beat a dead horse, but it might be because Murphy is not just a Mario Cuomo Democrat; he’s a Tim Geithner Democrat as well:

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Barack Obama continues to talk about bipartisanship, while pretending to be unaware that Congressional leaders are pulling stunts like this:

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on Wednesday announced his committee would hold hearings on the creation of a new truth commission to investigate myriad allegations of corruption and wrongdoing in the Bush administration.

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In his uninspiring inauguration speech, President Obama told the world we would not waver in defense of our way of life, and he told the evil doers that “our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”

That wasn’t even three weeks ago, but it seems like a different time. Since uttering that strong rhetoric, President Obama has backed away from the war on terror as fast as he can.

It started two days after Obama became the president. Obama directed the closing of the terrorist detention center in Guantanamo Bay, even though he has no clue what to do with the terrorists detained at Guantanamo.

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What the President’s Executive Order really means:

. . . Contrary to reports, Obama did not shut down Gitmo. Rather, he issued an order saying he will (or, to be precise, he intends to and is willing to commit in advance to) shut down Gitmo in a year’s time. This, to mix a metaphor, is kicking the can as far down the road as he possibly can without being penalized for delay of game. Or, to mix yet another metaphor, Obama is promising to write a popular book in a year’s time and is happy to pocket a sizable advance of good will and commentary now; book to be written later. Until then, however, other actions, like the shuttering of other detention centers, will have an immediate impact.

Read the whole thing for an interesting discussion on nomenclature as well. Interesting that so many people criticized George W. Bush for labeling the struggle against terrorism a “war,” but failed to pipe up when Barack Obama said the same thing in his Inaugural Address. Do they perhaps just think that he doesn’t mean it?

Well, not really:

The Obama administration fell in line with the Bush administration Thursday when it urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.

In a filing in San Francisco federal court, President Barack Obama adopted the same position as his predecessor. With just hours left in office, President George W. Bush late Monday asked U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to stay enforcement of an important Jan. 5 ruling admitting key evidence into the case.

Thursday’s filing by the Obama administration marked the first time it officially lodged a court document in the lawsuit asking the courts to rule on the constitutionality of the Bush administration’s warrantless-eavesdropping program. The former president approved the wiretaps in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

“The Government’s position remains that this case should be stayed,” the Obama administration wrote (.pdf) in a filing that for the first time made clear the new president was on board with the Bush administration’s reasoning in this case.

I am increasingly becoming concerned that the new President may inadvertently choke on a pretzel to complete the resemblance with his predecessor.

…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.