Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 05:04 pm
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin took to her Facebook page again today to attack President Obama for treating the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day terror attack as a criminal. Palin’s entire intellectual basis for argument is based on what she saw on Fox News, and things that she made up.
Palin’s post jumped right into the issue, “We are at war with radical Islamic extremists and treating this threat as a law enforcement issue is dangerous for our nation’s security. That’s what happened in the 1990s and we saw the result on September 11, 2001. This is a war on terror not an “overseas contingency operation.” Acts of terrorism are just that, not “man caused disasters.” The system did not work. Abdulmutallab was a child of privilege radicalized and trained by organized jihadists, not an “isolated extremist” who traveled to a land of “crushing poverty.” He is an enemy of the United States, not just another criminal defendant.”
If this argument sounds familiar to readers of this site, it should because Dick Morris said the same thing on Fox News last night. Here is the video:
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Palin then went off about the suspect being read Miranda rights, “It simply makes no sense to treat an al Qaeda-trained operative willing to die in the course of massacring hundreds of people as a common criminal. Reports indicate that Abdulmutallab stated there were many more like him in Yemen but that he stopped talking once he was read his Miranda rights. President Obama’s advisers lamely claim Abdulmutallab might be willing to agree to a plea bargain – pretty doubtful you can cut a deal with a suicide bomber. John Brennan, the President’s top counterterrorism adviser, bizarrely claimed “there are no downsides or upsides” to treating terrorists as enemy combatants. That is absurd.”
The real absurdity here is that Palin relies on a unnamed media report that has already been debunked. The White House has already said that according to CNN“FBI investigators gleaned usable, actionable intelligence from AbdulMutallab in the hours after his arrest.” Once again, Sarah Palin is completely wrong.
Palin launched into total speculation and fantasy,“There is a very serious downside to treating them as criminals: terrorists invoke their “right” to remain silent and stop talking. Terrorists don’t tell us where they were trained, what they were trained in, who they were trained by, and who they were trained with. Giving foreign-born, foreign-trained terrorists the right to remain silent does nothing to keep Americans safe from terrorist threats. It only gives our enemies access to courtrooms where they can publicly grandstand, and to defense attorneys who can manipulate the legal process to gain access to classified information.”
If the scenario that Palin lays out would actually occur, then all the civil trials of terror suspects, including those carried out by the Bush administration jeopardized national security. There is absolutely no proof that civil trials do anything to jeopardize US national security. Sarah has been watching too much 24.
There is something almost sad about watching such an intellectual lightweight pretend like she knows what she is talking about. This woman wants to be president, but the best that she can do is parrot talking points that she saw on Fox News. I don’t believe that Sarah Palin is naturally stupid. Her stupidity has it’s genesis in intellectual laziness and a belief that she can smile and wink her way to the presidency.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
