Posted by
Defend America on Wednesday, February 03, 2010 7:10:35 PM
Rigging the Numbers
We have not “convicted 195 terrorists in federal court since 2001.”
It
is welcome news that the Obama administration has reversed its
irrational decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11
plotters in Manhattan’s federal court. So far, however, the
administration has merely — and grudgingly — begun to climb out of this
hole of its own making.
The president seems more poised to
move his error than to correct it. Reports indicate that the
administration thinks the challenge now is to find a new location in
which to proceed with the same ill-advised civilian prosecution.
Instead, the idea at this point should be to build a sensible strategy
going forward: military commissions for now, and, ultimately, a new
system for handling national-security cases.
No such luck.
Rather than learn from this experience, the Left is doubling down on
civilian due process. Its agitprop du jour is a bogus numbers game. “We need to develop a greater resiliency in this country on security
issues,” Sarah E. Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and
International Studies
told the
New York Times.
“The administration needs to remind the American public that we have
convicted 195 international terrorists in federal courts since 2001.”
That 195 number is making the rounds. It is both false and an exercise in hypocrisy.
The
figure is mined from “In Pursuit of Justice,” a report published by
Human Rights First (HRF) in May 2008 and updated last July (available
here).
But the report does not claim that 195 international terrorists have
been convicted. Rather, it says that 195 defendants have been convicted
so far in 119 cases that have some connection, however attenuated, to
terrorism. (See the report’s preface.)
http://article.nationalreview.com/423463/rigging-the-numbers/andrew-c-mccarthy