The Wall Street Journal has this excellent column by Debra Burlingame about the lawyers hellbent on freeing terrorists from Guantanamo Bay.
How we deal with alien enemy combatants goes to the essence of the debate between those who see terrorism as a series of criminal acts that should be litigated in the justice system, one attack at a time, and those who see it as a global war where the "criminal paradigm" is no more effective against militant Islamists whose chief tactic is mass murder than indictments would have been in stopping Hitler's march across Europe. Michael Ratner and the lawyers in the Gitmo bar have expressly stated that the habeas corpus lawsuits are a tactic to prevent the U.S. military from doing its job. He has bragged that "The litigation is brutal [for the United States] . . . You can't run an interrogation . . . with attorneys." No, you can't. Lawyers can literally get us killed.
The purpose of these lawyers isn't to "do justice," it's to free terrorists so they can attack our soldiers again.
We may never know how many of the hundreds of repatriated detainees are back in action, fighting the U.S. or our allies thanks to the efforts of the Guantanamo Bay Bar. Approximately 20 former detainees have been confirmed as having returned to the battlefield, 12 of them killed by U.S. forces. Of the eight detainees who were rendered back to Kuwait for review of their cases, all were acquitted in criminal proceedings, including (Nasser Nijer Naser) al-Mutairi, who has given press interviews admitting that he was shot in the November 2001 uprising at Qala-I-Jangi.
Mutairi's story is detailed earlier in the column. He was one of the 538 prisoners who swarmed a U.S. military interrogator in an uprising in 2002. The interrogator, Johnny "Mike" Spann, was a former Marine who held off the terrorists and allowed others to escape. His reward? "His beaten and booby-trapped body was recovered with two bullet wounds in his head, the angle of trajectory suggesting he had been shot execution style."
The column provides more information about this thug and why the Guantanamo Bay Bar, smugly wrapping itself in its lawyerly duty to serve its clients, undermines American efforts to get rid of these enemies.
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