Karl Rove Didn't Go Far Enough

Rove claimed the liberals' wanted to indict the terrorists after 9/11, not destroy them. As Andrew McCarthy reveals, many liberals have another aim in mind---letting terrorists walk away:

The ACLU, HRW, and the Times are upset because dozens of people — they put the number at 70 predominantly Muslim men, but it's not a certain figure — were detained after the 9/11 attacks as "material witnesses," and thus "thrust into a Kafkaesque world of indefinite detention without charges, secret evidence, and baseless accusations." Some were held for weeks, and even months, and the majority were never even charged with a crime. Thus, the Times seethes, did "the Bush administration ... twist[] the American system of due process 'beyond recognition.'" Mind you, only the last two words quote from the ACLU/HRW study; the rest is what passes for "reporting" from the Gray Lady's Eric Lichtblau.

The studious hyperbole here signals the emptiness of this latest broadside.

Make no bones about it---treating these folks as criminals will result in their release. Many were captured on foreign soil in combat. What are we going to do, charge them with attempted murder of our troops?

The whole reason we've got the Guantanamo Bay facility set up is that it is not properly considered to be American soil. That gives our military some degree of freedom of action relatively unfettered by al Qaeda's Tort Brigade. Leftists like Lynne Stewart are more than eager to help these thugs escape from Uncle Sam, and one necessarily wonders why the Paper of Record based in the city most devastated by the 9/11 attacks want to see this happen.

Is it really worth so much to give Dubya a black eye?