The war of words between Attorney General Eric Holder and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Kentucky) continues to escalate.
The latest salvo came Wednesday, when Holder’s spokesman accused McConnell of selectively using Holder’s words.
The debate began late last week, when Holder praised the nation’s criminal justice system as an essential tool against terrorists in a speech to the American Constitution Society. McConnell took issue with Holder’s statements, saying in interviews last week and in a Washington Post op-ed today that Holder had insulted America’s military and was endangering the country’s security.
McConnell argued that Guantanamo and military commissions are the proper ways to deal with terrorists, and that civilian courts are unsuited to gather intelligence and prevent future attacks.
“Our top priority should have been to capture, detain and interrogate them to ensure they could no longer harm Americans,” McConnell said.
But Holder’s DOJ is firing back, and arguing that the court system has a proven track record of convicting terrorists and still gathering intelligence, a record they say is better than that of the military commissions McConnell is championing.
“Military commissions have produced shorter sentences, sometimes little more than time served,” DOJ spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement, adding that the commission are “largely untested” as compared to civilian courts. “And law enforcement officers working with the intelligence community have generated useful intelligence from suspects detained in civilian custody on too many occasions to count,” Miller said, citing the Christmas Day Detroit bomber as an example—a case that McConnell also cited, but as an example of a lack of intelligence-gathering.
Miller also accused McConnell of “selectively lifting words” from the speech, and of ignoring the administration’s balanced approach towards terrorism.
McConnell is on the offensive because of a terrorism case in his home state in which two Iraqi nationals were arrested and charged with planning attacks against American troops in Iraq. McConnell wants the two men, even though they were arrested on U.S. soil, to be moved to Guantanamo and tried in military commissions as foreign fighters. The federal government has not moved a terrorist caught domestically to military custody since the 2001 arrest of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, and Padilla was later moved back into civilian courts after legal challenges to his military detention.
Holder has championed civilian trials of terrorist suspects before, such as his attempted trial of 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, a move which met with much political backlash and had to be reversed, but Holder appears committed to their continued use, at least in some trials. He has also been open to using military commissions in some cases.
Republicans have been trying to pass a law banning terrorist trials in civilian courts, a move the DOJ says interferes with executive authority.
“We must use every weapon available – military, diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement – to defeat a determined enemy,” Miller said. “Taking one of those weapons off the table would endanger our national security.”
Despite the political battle over trying Middle Eastern and Islamic extremist terrorists in civilian courts, no opposition has been raised to the DOJ’s longtime use of civilian courts to try other kinds of violent extremists. On Monday, three members of the Colombian terrorist organization FARC were convicted in federal court in New York, the same court in which Holder had planned to try KSM.
