End Of An Era
Canada has more common sense that Barack Obama. Our northern neighbor wants nothing to do with Barack’s neighbor, Bill Ayers. Toronto Star:
An American education professor, one of the founders of a radical 1960s group known as the Weather Underground, which was responsible for a number of bombings in the United States in the early 1970s, was turned back at the Canadian border last night.
Dr. William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a leader in educational reform, was scheduled to speak at the Centre for Urban Schooling at University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. But that appearance has now been temporarily cancelled.
“I don’t know why I was turned back,” Ayers said in an interview this morning from Chicago. “I got off the plane like everyone else and I was asked to come over to the other side. The border guards reviewed some stuff and said I wasn’t going to be allowed into Canada. To me it seems quite bureaucratic and not at all interesting … If it were me I would have let me in. I couldn’t possibly be a threat to Canada.”
Ayers made headlines this summer after Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin suggested that then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama hung around with domestic terrorists like Ayers. The professor had hosted a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama in 1995, during his run for the state Senate. They also worked together on Chicago school reform and served on a charity board together.
Talk about change. Clearly we’re entering a new era when Canada is more sensible than the man who is about to be president of the United States. But if Obama wants to base his foreign policy and the treatment of terrorists on what the rest of the world wants, maybe this is a good place to start. There’s something to hope for.
Malkin thinks we should hire some of those Canadians.
Gateway on some people with new respect for the office of the presidency … now that their guy is inbound.
Speaking of Obama’s failure to make sense, here’s WSJ and Counterterrorism Blog on the Iran-Al-Qaeda connection. It’s a headsup about the people with whom he wants to have direct talks and begin to build a relationship of trust.
Here’s another place to kick off the new era. Keep Guantanamo open. Because the rest of the world doesn’t want any of these guys back. Reuters:
GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba, Jan 19 (Reuters) – The Guantanamo war crimes court convened in a chaotic session on Monday with accused Sept. 11 plotters disrupting the proceedings while U.S. government lawyers debated whether an administrative hiccup had left them facing any charges at all.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 hijacked plane plot, tried unsuccessfully to banish all Americans from his defense table in the courtroom at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and complained when the judge asked him to limit his comments.
“This is terrorism, not court. You don’t give us opportunity to talk,” Mohammed told the judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley.
Mohammed complained when a prosecutor characterized the charges against him and four co-defendants as the “murder” of nearly 3,000 innocent men, women and children.
But Mohammed, who has repeatedly acknowledged his guilt on charges that could lead to his execution, later told the court, “We don’t care about the capital punishment … we are doing jihad for the cause of God.”
Defendant Ramzi Binalshibh, whose mental competency to act as his own attorney is the subject of an ongoing challenge, told the court, “We did what we did and we are proud of this. We are proud of 9-11.”
The NYT editorial board, by the way, has a detailed proposal for what to do with these guys, and particularly like Feinstein’s absurd plan:
It sets a one-year deadline and requires that every prisoner either be charged and tried in United States federal court; transferred for trial by an international tribunal under United Nations authority; returned to the custody of the government of their homeland, if that government does not abuse and torture prisoners; held as a prisoner of war; or, simply, released.
The only part of that that makes any sense is holding them as prisoners of war, or more specifically, as illegal combatants. Which is essentially what the Bush administration was doing. Only one problem. NYT ed board concludes that’s wrong, and admits it doesn’t know what to do with these guys.
After the prisoners are sorted out, Mr. Bush’s egregiously bad judgment leaves all Americans with a huge problem. The abuses authorized by top Bush officials, and so gleefully defended by Mr. Cheney in particular in the last few weeks, create the possibility that men like Mohammed al-Qahtani and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will never be able to face justice in a real courtroom.
Mr. Obama’s team will have to come up with a solution that does not set such men free. We are not sure what it should be, but there is one unacceptable choice: creating a new detentions law that would allow them held without trial.
Isn’t that what holding them as illegal combatants does?
Topics: Canada, Obama, terrorists
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 8:21 pm Comments (4) on Monday, January 19, 2009
4 Responses to “End Of An Era”
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January 19th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Well, we can’t try them, we can’t let them go, we can’t keep them. Seems to me that execution is the only option left.
And that torture crap the NYT and leftists keep spewing. I’ve read the reports of what the prisoners went through. That’s sounds way more like a fraternity hazing than torture. If the Congress Critters want to read about torture, they ought to read the intel summaries of what the Taliban and AQ did to captured Americans.
Personally, I would not be at all opposed to executing the lot of them. Other’s mileage may, of course, vary.
January 20th, 2009 at 1:04 am
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January 20th, 2009 at 1:42 am
The abuses authorized by top Bush officials, and so gleefully defended by Mr. Cheney in particular in the last few weeks, create the possibility that men like Mohammed al-Qahtani and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will never be able to face justice in a real courtroom.
Well, there you go. Might as well keep them locked up, then, since we can’t figure out what to do with them. Twenty or thirty years of cell inactivity and luxurious halal feeding will reduce them to playing chess with each other. Too bad about the taxpayer dollars, though.
January 20th, 2009 at 3:16 am
Can we keep them locked up in the Iron Maiden? Then we can discuss whether or not to try them at leisure.