Dirty Wars and Democracy

Ben Ambruster, Thinkprogress.org, Dec. 12, 2008

Last month, former Attorney General John Ashcroft spoke before the Hudson Union Society in New York. During his speech, Ashcroft asked the question, “What do we do with people apprehended in the war,” and proceeded to defend and support the Bush administration’s detention policies since 9/11.

Ashcroft said he is “stunned” that so many Americans (and the Supreme Court it turns out) think that terror suspect detainees should have their day in court. He then meandered through the alternatives to detention, such as “kill[ing] everybody on the battlefield” or releasing prisoners, which he said he “is not in favor of.” But astonishingly, Ashcroft then concluded that the detention of suspected terrorists “has been a humanitarian act.”

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Obama can give the Left what it wants and weaken national security. Or he can listen to his more prudent advisers.

by Stuart Taylor Jr. – The National Journal Magazine

Saturday, Dec. 6, 2008

President-elect Obama’s announcement of his (mostly) stellar national security team coincides with the release this week of a bipartisan commission report with this chilling assessment of the most important challenge that team faces: “Without greater urgency and decisive action by the world community, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.”

Perhaps the commission, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and other experts who have issued similarly dramatic warnings are crying wolf. Perhaps the likelihood of any terrorist group getting a nuclear bomb is “vanishingly small,” as Ohio State political science professor John Mueller has forcefully argued. Or perhaps it’s closer to 30 percent over the next 10 years, as Matthew Bunn of Harvard’s Kennedy School estimated last month in “Securing the Bomb 2008.”

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