http://washingtonexaminer.com/jed-babbin-what-must-be-done-to-prevent-future-bostons/article/2528029
Since 9/11, we have turned ourselves inside out to prevent terror attacks.
We went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. We created the Department of Homeland Security and all its trappings, including the Transportation Security Administration, and told U.S. intelligence agencies to share information among themselves and with the cops.
But it wasn’t our huge security apparatus that prevented Richard Reid from blowing his shoe bomb, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from stuffing explosives in his underwear and so many others, like the would-be Times Square bomber, from killing people by the hundreds.
It was just luck, and the bravery of private citizens on the spot, that blocked those attacks. We weren’t lucky when Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people at Fort Hood while shouting “Allah akbar.”
And now, with the Boston Marathon bombing, it appears our luck has run out. So what do we do now?
There is a lot we can do, but none of it will be done while President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are in charge.
First and most obviously, people such as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving alleged Boston bomber, should be declared enemy combatants and sent to Guantanamo Bay for interrogation, trial and punishment.
It is constitutional and legal to do so, even in the case of American citizens, as the Supreme Court said in 1942 (in Ex Parte Quirin) and again in 2002 (in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld). The White House’s refusal to
do that is purely political, and it is wrong.
It’s wrong because these terrorists aren’t just guilty of criminal acts. They usually know information that can be used to stop other attacks and that can’t be garnered in civilian custody.
They adhere to an Islamist ideology, which is the equivalent of a foreign nation. It requires war with us and deserves to be fought as much as those who adhere to it. To fight that ideology effectively requires us to judge them under the law of war, a different standard from that to which we hold civilians.