Soldiers are not cops. Marines are not cops. Sailors are not cops. Airmen are not cops.

Hopefully no one is surprised by those statements. After all, we know that they are fighting men and women.

But the decision by our inept new president to treat terrorists as criminals rather than enemies may mean that all of those incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay may need to be released – because if they are going to get civilian trials with all the protections accorded the Americans arrested for crimes in this country, then all evidence and confessions obtained heretofore will have to be thrown out. Why? Because the terrorists taken on the field of battle were not read their Miranda rights by the fighting men who captured them and were not accorded rights given criminal suspects under the Bill of Rights and relevant Supreme Court interpretations thereof.

Accused in a 2002 grenade blast that wounded two U.S. soldiers near an Afghan market, Mohammed Jawad was sent as a youth to Guantanamo Bay. Now, under orders by President Obama, he could one day be among detainees whose fate is finally decided by a U.S. court.

But in a potential problem, Pentagon officials note that most of the evidence against Jawad comes from his own admissions. And neither he nor any other detainee at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was ever told about their rights against self-incrimination under U.S. law.

The Miranda warning, a fixture of American jurisprudence and staple of television cop shows, may also be one of a series of constructional hurdles standing between Obama's order to close the island prison and court trials on the mainland.

A procession of similar challenges -- secret evidence, information from foreign spy services and coerced statements -- also could spell trouble for prosecutors.

All of these problems illustrate the larger difficulty that lies ahead as the nation moves from the "law of war" orientation used by the Bush administration in dealing with detainees to the civilian legal approach preferred by Obama.

Yep, Barry Hussein has really screwed the pooch on this one. By muddying the distinction between war and criminal justice, he has virtually guaranteed that the enemy will be released to return to the field of battle where he can kill more American soldiers – and civilians.

Are there aspects of the Bush policies on the detainees that reasonable people can quibble over? Yeah, I suppose there are. But the one thing that sensible folks cannot dispute is that he – like FDR during WWII – recognized that fighting a war is very different from fighting crime, and that dealing with the enemy is very different from dealing with lawbreakers. Barack Obama does not understand that – and having campaigned on a promise to undo the Bush policies and treat terrorism as an exercise in criminal justice rather than national defense, he will be hard pressed to step back from his absurd plans. Even if that means that America will be objectively less safe from terrorism than it was during the Bush years.

Andrew McCarthy offers a fantastic analysis of the other flaws of ObamaÂ’s proposed solution to the problem of Gitmo in a fine article in National Review.

UPDATE: Allahpundit points to this little gem from Sarah Palin back during the campaign.

Al Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America, and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights.

Turns out she hit it right on the head. And it only took the LA Times five months to show that her concerns were dead on.

Posted by: Greg at 01:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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