Attorney General John Ashcroft Wednesday welcomed President Bush’s decision to try Osama Bin Laden and other members of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network in a military court rather than returning them to the United States to face trial in a federal courtroom.
“The United States is in the state of war, and I think it’s important to give the president of the United States the maximum flexibility consistent with his constitutional authority,” Ashcroft said during a press conference to announced a restructuring of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Ashcroft said military commissions have been used throughout history and their constitutionality has been upheld by the US Supreme Court.
“It’s pretty clear to me that the president is very well within the limits that have been sanctioned by the United States Supreme Court. And foreign terrorists who commit war crimes against the United States, in my judgment, are not entitled to and do not deserve the protections of the American Constitution.”
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Those hand-wringers
“AMID ALL OF THIS GOOD news (out of Afghanistan), it’s worth recalling the hand-wringing of only two weeks ago,” the Wall Street Journal says.
“Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, who fancies himself a future president, publicly moaned about the road ahead. The allies hinted at a bombing halt. The pundit class turned the Taleban, like the Iraqi tank columns of 1991, into the new Viet Cong. And as ever, there were the Arab masses, destined to rise up and topple our ‘moderate’ American friends,” the newspaper said in an editorial.
“These counsels of timidity will no doubt appear again, perhaps at the first sign of a setback, and certainly when it’s time to turn to Iraq and other terrorist protectors. But they have been wrong so far about Afghanistan, just as they were wrong about Serbia and about Saddam Hussein the first time. The war on terrorism is a long way from over. But the lesson of these early days is that victory is probable, provided that American military power is backed by political resolve.”
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Commando audits
AT A TIME WHEN commandos are busy preparing for war, US Special Operations Command has sent out a warning: Watch what you spend out of the Pentagon’s $20 billion in emergency money to fight the war on terrorism.
“It is incumbent on all SOF (special operation forces) financial managers to ensure the funds for these resources are fully accounted for and used for the intended purposes,” states an internal memo, a copy of which we obtained.
Some Army Special Forces soldiers are viewing the memo as “poor timing.” They note that their units are gearing up for extremely risky operations inside Afghanistan.
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Seymour Hersh got it wrong
“THE HIGHEST LEVELS of the Pentagon have rebutted Seymour Hersh’s contention in the New Yorker that the first US commando ground attack was a disaster. They specifically dispute the investigative reporter’s contention that the Taleban seriously injured Delta Force soldiers in a fierce firefight,” writes the Washington Times.
“The US special operations community tells us there are other problems with the story. For example, Hersh wrote that 16 AC-130 gunships backed the commandos in a raid in Kandahar. But there are only 21 of the aircraft in the entire Air Force inventory.
“Military sources said the Pentagon would never send nearly the entire fleet to one war theater. And, the sources said, it would never use that many of the lumbering flying battleships over one target area. Hersh also quotes a Delta Force member as saying, ‘Next time, we’re going to lose a company.’ Said an Army officer, ‘That unit works in troops and squadrons, not companies and battalions. It sounded like something based on a rumor.”
