Nine suspected terrorists, self-described religious warriors, with plans to kill police officers are apprehended before they can carry out any of their nefarious plans. Now, they are being released on bail. What I want to know is why they were not treated as enemy combatants and delivered straight to Gitmo? I do not want to rehash the debates at the time of the initial arrest of the Hutaree, but their release, in combination with talk about whether Faisal Shahzad should be granted constitutional protections, helps to demonstrate how schizophrenic our national discourse on terrorism has become.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is even proposing that that Shahzad should be stripped of his citizenship, while the Hutaree keep theirs. Does he, as Chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, have some special knowledge about domestic terrorists verse those operating for foreign agents? Do they kill differently? Terrorize differently? How does he explain allowing Americans to fight in the Israeli Defense Forces, when top military leaders say that Israel’s actions are a threat to American interests? It seems that our current strategy is not to fight for our rights and freedoms, but to fight for special interest groups. We cannot treat terrorists who fight for the Second Amendment because we might upset a special interest group concerned with guns. We cannot incarcerate white terrorists like we do non-white (immigrant) terrorists because we might upset a special interest group that is anti-immigration.
I think it would be great if there was a special interest group of people opposed to terrorism who would demand consistency and logic in the way we treat terrorists and terrorism suspects. People like Matt Savino, the Muslim who turned in the Hutaree, or Aliou Niasse, who was involved in foiling the Times Square car bomb. Maybe then we can move past the discussion about protecting our own tribes and worry about protecting the nation.
