Keep Gitmo Terrorists out of the United States

President Obama is attacking a red herring when he defends his decision to send the worst terrorists at Guantanamo to prisons in the United States by pointing out that the likelihood of escape from secure federal facilities is very low. Of course it is. No rope ladder or knitted-together sheets or prison laundry truck is likely to do the trick. But, of federal judges, we can't be that sure.

That's why we put them in Guantanamo in the first place rather than bring them onto U.S. soil. We never really worried that they might escape. The Bush administration feared, quite correctly, that once the inmates were in federal prisons on U.S. territory, federal judges would take their pleas for constitutional rights more seriously. That argument is still true, and bringing them to the United States puts us at risk that they will be freed, not by an escape committee, but by court order.

Some detainees will be tried in U.S. courts on U.S. soil. The first one will be tried in New York. This raises two other problems:

a) If he is acquitted, where will he be released? Likely, he will just be invited to walk out the door onto the streets of old New York; and b) Is there a danger of terrorist retaliation or attempts to interdict the trial with violence?

Trying a terrorist in the Big Apple serves to paint a bull's-eye on the courthouse, inviting attack. The recently foiled plot against air facilities in the New York region demonstrates that al-Qaida has the city in its sights and has ever since the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. Could Obama find a worse place to conduct a trial?

And the very concept of trying terrorists under American law creates 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.

That is because we did not plan to try them in civilian courts, we did not take care to see that the evidence against them was obtained so as to be admissible in a civilian court.

But if Obama is now to reverse field and, in fact, try these terrorists, the results might be disastrous. The prosecutors will probably not be able to get the best evidence against them in because it was gathered without an eye to its admissibility in a criminal trial. For example, the best evidence against the 20th hijacker, Zacharias Moussaoui, could not be used, so he did not get a death sentence.

And if the terrorists are released, either by an acquittal or by a federal judge's ruling, the odds are good that they will go right back to fighting against us. In our book "Fleeced," we describe some of the most egregious examples of freed terrorists who returned to fight against us again. In his speech, former Vice President Dick Cheney said that one in seven of the detainees freed from Guantanamo rejoined the terrorists.

Consider the case of Abdullah Mehsud, captured in Afghanistan and freed following two years at Gitmo after hiding his real identity as second in command of a Pakistani Taliban group. Once free, he kidnapped two Chinese engineers who were working on a hydroelectric dam and killed one of them. He died in 2007 — three years after his release — when he blew himself up to avoid capture. There is also Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar, a senior Taliban commander, freed after eight months at Gitmo. He was killed leading Taliban forces in Uruzgan Province by Afghan security forces.

In all, at least 50 terrorists who have been freed from Gitmo have been identified as taking up arms against us again.

Obama's plans will put this kind of men right in our midst, awaiting either a trial they may win or a federal court ruling that may spring them.

To find out more about Dick Morris and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 DICK MORRIS AND EILEEN MCGANN

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