This is rich coming from the likes of Liz Cheney. She's worried about the terrorists having "a public platform where they can spew venom". Well the "mainstream media" has given you and your daddy one, so what's the problem? Pat Leahy explained why this fear mongering is utter nonsense on Face the Nation today. What she's worried about are her father's pesky war crimes coming to light. Not that Chris Wallace would ever ask her about that, would you Chrissy?
WALLACE: Liz, what do you worry about most, the security threat to New York, the possible danger that intelligence secrets will be disclosed, the possibility one of these guys will get off, or something else? What's your biggest concern?
CHENEY: You know, I think it is absolutely unconscionable that we are a nation at war and that the president of the United States simultaneously is denying our troops on the ground in Afghanistan the resources that they need to prevail to win that war while he ushers terrorists onto the homeland.
He's going to put these terrorists in a courthouse that is six blocks from where over 2,000 Americans were killed on the worst attack in history on the American homeland.
He's going to give them a public platform where they can spew venom, where they can preach jihad, where they can reach out and recruit other terrorists. And it is totally unnecessary.
When the attorney general says that he's bringing them to justice, he's ignoring the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed asked 11 months ago to be executed for Allah. He asked to plead guilty and be executed. We should have said, "All right, you've got it."
Instead, we're bringing him and his cohorts to America. We're giving them the constitutional rights of American citizens. And the attorney general throughout the day on Friday talked about this as a crime.
He said in that same interview Mara is talking about that this will be treated like any other crime.
WALLACE: But what about...
CHENEY: There's no question but that the Obama administration now has in a completely indefensible way taken us back to a pre-9/11 treatment of terrorism...
WALLACE: But what about the...
CHENEY: ... as a crime.
WALLACE: .. argument that the Bush administration had all of these people for eight years -- they got a total of three convictions in eight years in military commissions.
CHENEY: The Bush administration worked very hard to put together military commissions. The first round of military commissions that they put together, which were based on the precedent of the FDR military commissions -- full constitutional precedent, approved by the Supreme Court in the 1940s -- were rejected by the Supreme Court.
The administration then put together a new set of military commissions approved by Congress, and they have held these guys at Guantanamo now where they are providing -- presenting no threat at all to the United States.
WALLACE: But three convictions in eight years is not much of a record.
CHENEY: You know, but I think that if you ask the family members of these people -- I mean, you saw the family members, for example, of Daniel Pearl. You know, they do not want to see the United States for no -- there's no legal, no national security, no constitutional reason why we should be giving these people a megaphone from which they can recruit future jihadis, from which they can mock the victims of these attacks, and from which they can really put the U.S. government on trial.
They'll ask for access to classified information, and they'll get access to a lot of classified information in the civilian court system.
