Elmer's Brother

One has to wonder just how the left will come to the aid of these thugs and murderers. I can hardly wait. I hope they start right away, the election is coming up, that would show their true colors.

My guess is that these guys are all a bunch of prison b*tches by now, trading sex for cigarettes and have the nickname Vicky.

from Opinioin Journal

Raising the Stakes
In June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that war-crimes trials of al Qaeda detainees could not go forward without congressional authorization for the military commissions that were to conduct those proceedings. President Bush had let it be known that he would announce his proposal for such legislation today. Earlier this afternoon he did so in dramatic fashion.

The president announced that 14 top al Qaeda detainees have been transferred from the CIA's custody to the military's. The terrorists, who were at a secret foreign location, now are being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They "include Khalid Sheik Mohammed, believed to be the No. 3 al-Qaida leader before he was captured in Pakistan in 2003; Ramzi Binalshibh, an alleged would-be Sept. 11, 2001, hijacker; and Abu Zubaydah, who was believed to be a link between Osama bin Laden and many al-Qaida cells before he was also captured in Pakistan, in March 2002," the Associated Press reports. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (PDF) has bios for all 14.

This was a closely held secret. Less than a week ago we visited Guantanamo, where we were extensively briefed, but we didn't hear a word about these transfers. We were told that four Gitmo detainees had been charged with war crimes before Hamdan put the process on hold, so that the total presumably is now 18.

Our first reaction to this news is that it certainly raises the stakes in Congress. Before the announcement this afternoon, liberal blogs were all atwitter about "kangaroo courts"; it strikes us that it'll be harder for even the hard left to present the likes of KSM and Binalshibh as victims.

It should be noted that the U.S. is under no obligation to provide these enemy combatants with a trial at all. The liberal Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged in the Hamdan decision that enemy combatants can be held without charge for the duration of the war; the Nuremberg trials didn't take place until after World War II was over. It will be interesting to see if any serious opposition arises to the president's proposal, given that the opportunity is simply to let the terrorists rot.

and this from the peanut gallery

Corn Chips
David Corn of The Nation, who was the first to suggest that Valerie Plame's "outing" violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, now has established that it did not, as he writes on the left-wing rag's Web site:

Her specific position at the CIA is revealed for the first time in a new book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by the author of this article and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff. The book chronicles the inside battles within the CIA, the White House, the State Department and Congress during the run-up to the war. Its account of Wilson's CIA career is mainly based on interviews with confidential CIA sources. . . .

Valerie Wilson [her married name] was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration.

But although she was stationed overseas under nonofficial cover, "in 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division." That was more than five years before Richard Armitage leaked her identity, too long for that disclosure to have violated the act.

Nonetheless, the New York Times, which led the witch hunt for the leaker, still describes her as "covert"!

Oh, and by the way, if her work was so important to national security, what is Corn doing disclosing it, "based on interviews with confidential CIA sources"? Maybe Attorney General Alberto Gonzales should appoint a special prosecutor--no, make it a very special prosecutor--to investigate who leaked this vital information to the ears of Corn.