For Immediate Release: October 7, 2009
Contact: Megan Mitchell, (202) 225-2571
Today during the conference committee meeting on the Homeland Security Appropriations Bill, House Democrats left the door open for terrorists to be transferred to U.S. soil and took deliberate steps to convert our soldiers into international policemen.
By removing the Senate language to keep detainees out of the United States, the liberal leadership has cleared the way for terrorists to be tried in U.S. courts and housed in U.S. detention facilities all at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. House Democrats, lead by Rep. Price (D-NC) and Rep. Farr (D-CA) welcomed the idea of bringing terrorists onto U.S. soil to as a way to honor the Constitution.
I am outraged by the committee’s actions today. Terrorists who kill innocent people and do not abide by international law should not be housed on U.S. soil and granted the same rights as American citizens. And U.S. soldiers should be capturing and killing America’s sworn enemies on the battlefield, not reading Miranda Rights and collecting evidence for the terrorists to use in our courts.
If I’m not mistaken, in June Rep. Culberson voted in favor of the language he now refers to as “[leaving] the door open for terrorists to be transferred to U.S. soil and [taking] deliberate steps to convert our soldiers into international policemen.” He, and most other Appropriations Republicans, approved of what’s called a “perfecting amendment” to the amendment prohibiting the transfer of Gitmo detainees to the US. The perfecting amendment ensured that there was an exception to that prohibition for the purposes of prosecuting detainees in the US. So he voted in favor of what he’s now calling an outrage.
This is a total outrage – we are not the police and they are putting our military in harms way with this ridiculous attitude. I would rather see all our guys come home than turn into some police guard for the UN.
From an article published May 29, 2009.
There Are Already 355 Terrorists in American Prisons.
It makes one wonder: Do any of these legislators know who’s in their backyards already, with no apparent detriment to their constituents’ daily lives, much less the nation’s security?
According to data provided by Traci L. Billingsley, spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, federal facilities on American soil currently house 216 international terrorists and 139 domestic terrorists. Some of these miscreants have been locked up here since the early 1990s. None of them has escaped. At the most secure prisons, nobody has ever escaped, period.
Maybe these people don’t understand what life is like in these “supermax” prisons. Take ADX Florence, the supermax in Colorado—”the Alcatraz of the Rockies”—that serves as the home to Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheikh” who organized the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the Sept. 11 plotters; Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber; Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”; and Terry Nichols, who helped plan the Oklahoma City bombing, to name a few.
These are all truly dangerous people, but it’s not as if they run into one another in the lunch line or the yard. There is no lunch line; there is no yard. Most of the prisoners are kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. For one hour, they’re taken to another concrete room, indoors, to exercise, by themselves. Their only windows face the sky, so they have no way of knowing even where they are within the prison. Phone calls to the outside world are banned. Finally, the prison is crammed with cameras and motion detectors. Compartments are separated by 1,400 remote-controlled steel doors; the place is surrounded by 12-foot-high razor-wire fences; the area between the wire and the walls is further secured by laser beams and attack dogs.
Link to complete article at http://www.slate.com/id/2219268/
Once again, Culberson proves himself to be a reactionary and not a factuary. This type of fear mongering is unacceptable from a member of congress. Just to set the record straight, Johnnyboy, they’re not being sent here for vacation. You should be ashamed of your comments and immediately retract them with an apology to the citizens of District 7 and the rest of the country.