Wartime issues – assuming we are at war!

The debate about the Christmas Day Bomber continues.   The pundits continue to define “success” in this case as finding him guilty in a court of law.  They go on and on, repeating over and over again, how the evidence is so strong, how the civilian court system is so reliable, how the shoe bomber was tried in civilian court, and how a guilty verdict is virtually certain.  

This is so wrong.  The definition of success is not whether we find the Christmas Day Bomber guilty in a civilian court.  This man intended to blow himself up on Christmas Day, and take hundreds of innocent Americans with him.  The fact that he is alive today, facing a jury or a judge and possible jail time or, at the worst, the death penalty, is a mere footnote to him.

Has it occurred to anyone that if the military had interrogated the shoe bomber as the failed terrorist that he was, that the odds of the Christmas Day Bomber getting on that plane with those explosives would have been diminished?  And interrogating the Christmas Day terrorist instead of shipping him off to the local prosecutor — for reasons Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General, has yet to articulate– diminishes the odds of some future terrorist act?

We are at war!

These people attacked us as part of the ongoing war with terrorists.   No one should “rest easy” because some lawyer is going to sleepwalk through a trial that may or may not successfully reach the painfully obvious conclusion that the Christmas Day Bomber is guilty! On the contrary, it makes me very uneasy that he is in the civilian court system at this point in time at all, because every moment spent reading this man his rights is a moment that could have been spent gathering intelligence from a terrorist.  His punishment will come in due time.  In the meanwhile, we have to extract as much information from his as we can in order to defend ourselves.

We are at war.

By Sherry Jarrell