Today in Washington, D.C. - Feb 3, 2010 - Time for Brown to be Seated & for Eric Holder to Back Off!

Senate will vote at 12:30 PM on the confirmation of the nomination of Patricia Smith to be solicitor for the Labor Department.  Following this vote,  they will hold two hours of debate on the nomination of Martha Johnson to head the General Services Administration and will then vote on cloture on her nomination. If cloture is invoked, the Senate will vote on the confirming of Johnson.

Yesterday, Sen. Elect Scott Browns via his attorney sent a demand to to be seated in the Senate to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Brown has met all the constitutional requirements to be seated. Various news sources are reporting that Brown should receive the mandatory signatures necessary to be seated from Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin and Governor Patrick this morning and that Scott hopefully will be sworn in by 5:00 pm today as U.S. Senator.; Back in 1962, Sen. Kennedy himself was seated just one day after winning his special election but now the democrats have not been in a rush to seat Brown who will become the 41st Republican vote in the Senate. Reid had previously promised not to proceed with issues until Scott was seated but this has not been the case. In addition, the appointed temporary Democrat Senator from Massachusetts has continued to vote even though his tenure in office representing the people of Massachusetts ended with the people's election of Scott Brown as their US Senator. "The people have spoken." It is time for Senator Brown to begin serving the people of Massachusetts.

The Washington Post writes today, “The Obama administration is aggressively pushing back against Republican criticism of its handling of terrorism suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, sharpening a partisan debate about national security policy . . . . White House press secretary Robert Gibbs issued a rare point-by-point critique of a statement by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) . . . . The rebuttal followed a hastily arranged briefing for reporters the previous evening by a senior administration official, who argued against GOP assertions that Abdulmutallab stopped providing his FBI interrogators with intelligence after he was read his Miranda rights. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. also weighed in Wednesday with a letter to Senate Republicans in which he said the legal decisions in the Abdulmutallab case were consistent with the strategy used during George W. Bush's administration.”

Despite the characterizations of The Post and some in the Obama administration, this debate is not about politics, but about the policies that will most effectively keep Americans safe from our committed enemies.

In a speech on terrorism policy at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said, “Instead of addressing the substantive policy concerns many of us have expressed about this incident, the administration has put anonymous sources on the telephone with reporters to take shots at their critics. These anonymous sources have leaked information aimed at rehabilitating and justifying the administration’s mishandling of the Nigerian bomber. . . .  Yet despite their best efforts the fact remains that all the intelligence he possessed concerning the locations, training techniques, and communications methods of Al Qaeda in Yemen is perishable. Yemeni forces needed that information on December 25th, not six weeks later. Meanwhile, the American people are left to wonder whether, in place of interrogations, their safety depends on terrorists having families who can persuade them to talk.”

McConnell went on to explain how the administration’s now well-documented mishandling of the Christmas Day bomber is indicative of a deeper problem: “namely, the administration’s apparent belief that terrorism is a narrow law enforcement — not a military and intelligence — matter. The fact is, the administration’s handling of the Christmas Day Bomber should come as no surprise to anyone. The events of December 25^th may have focused many peoples’ minds on the practical consequences of a pre-9/11 mentality. But anyone who’s paid attention to the administration’s terror-related policies over the past year can see a clear pattern at play here.”

Sen. McConnell emphasized, “The bottom line is this: Treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter is precisely the attitude that kept us from seeing this threat when we should have. Reverting to it now is not only dangerous, it’s potentially disastrous.”

And even Eric Holder apparently understood this at one point. Steven Hayes of  The Weekly Standard reported last night, “In an interview with CNN on January 28, 2002, Holder expressed concern that the U.S. government was unlikely to obtain valuable intelligence from American Taliban John Walker Lindh because he was in the United States and had a lawyer.” Holder told CNN, “it’s hard to interrogate him at this point now that he has a lawyer and now that he is here in the United States.” As Hayes says, “He was right in 2002.”

Holder should "Back Off" and not be chairing most of the various special committees on the War on Terror. he has no experience with dealing with foreign terrorist or protecting the United States from foreign terrorists. he and hsi staff are in the way of the lawfully constituted, CIA, FBI, The Military and even the Department of Homeland Security which is an a mess within itself. While there duties that AG Eric Holder and his office should be addressing, the relocation KSM and other Gitmo terrorists to places like Thompson, Illinois and then holding civilian trials with rights of US citizens is not among those duties. As expressed yesterday in a post addressing Perspective in Reality: KSM will never get a civilian trial, "Could the Obama Administration have been really so stupid in screwing up the the trial of KSM and his cohorts? If so, how can Americans ever trust this administration?"

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Tags: Eric Holder, Gitmo, Massachusetts, Mitch McConnell, Scott Brown, terrorism, US Congress, US House, US Senate, Washington D.C. To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!