Liberal judges are terrorist best hope to escape

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann:

PRESIDENT Obama is attacking a red herring when he defends his decision to send the worst terrorists at Guantanamo to United States prisons by saying the likelihood of escape from secure federal facilities is very low.

Of course it is. No rope ladder or prison laundry truck is likely to do the trick.

But when it comes to federal judges, we can't be so sure.

The reason we sent the terrorists to Guantanamo in the first place, rather than bring them onto US soil, was never really connected to worries that they might escape. The Bush administration feared, quite correctly, that if the inmates were in federal prisons on US territory, federal judges would take their pleas for constitutional rights more seriously.

That argument is still true, and bringing the terrorists to the United States puts us at risk that they could be freed by court order.

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Trying a terrorist in the Big Apple serves to paint a bull's-eye on the courthouse. The recently foiled plan to attack New York City synagogues demonstrates that terrorists have the city in their sights, as they have since the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Could Obama find a worse place to conduct a trial?

The very concept of trying terrorists under US law is a slippery slope. We specifically allow our military and intelligence operatives to proceed without the procedural safeguards enumerated in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth amendments. Why? Because we didn't plan for trials in civilian courts, we didn't take care to see that the evidence was obtained so as to be admissible in civilian courts.

If Obama is now to reverse field and try these terrorists, the results might be disastrous. It's unlikely that the prosecutors would be able to use all the evidence against them because it wasn't gathered with an eye to its admissibility in a criminal trial. The best evidence couldn't be used against the 20th hijacker, Zacharias Moussaui, so he did not get a death sentence or even life in prison.

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I am sure none were given a Miranda warning. That is because we wanted information to stop attacks and not to build a case. Al Qaeda's useful idiots at the ACLU and the human rights wacko organizations are just worried about indefinite detention at this point, but at some point they will get around to wanting to set them free because there was no Miranda warning. They are stuck so far in the lawfare mode, they can't see the consequences of their positions or don't care.