What Are These People Thinking ?

All of us remember the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.  The fact that this bombing occurred is a tribute to political correctness and the stupidity of attempting diplomacy where strength is needed.

Investors.com posted an editorial yesterday about the prosecution of the terrorist who masterminded the attack on the USS Cole.  Included in the editorial was the following:

“It’s bad enough that our rules of engagement dictated that a U.S. warship visiting a known terrorist haven “was defended by sailors with unloaded guns,” as the London Daily Telegraph reported several weeks later. “If we had shot those people, we’d have gotten in trouble for it,” Petty Officer Jennifer Kudrick, a sonar technician and Cole survivor, told the Telegraph. “We would have gotten in more trouble for shooting two foreigners than losing 17 American sailors.”

“It’s also bad enough that the only reason the Cole was in Yemen to begin with was apparently because the Clinton administration was trying to get the Yemeni government’s support for Middle East peace initiatives.”

The charges against the Al Qaeda operative who planned the attack, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, have temporarily been dropped. 

The editorial states:

“A filing by the Obama Justice Department last week in the D.C. Court of Appeals stated that “no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future.” A military official told the Washington Post on condition of anonymity that it’s all politics because, he believes, the administration does not want a high-profile terrorist tried in a military tribunal before major figures held at Guantanamo Bay start having civilian trials — as the president and Attorney General Eric Holder prefer.”

The editorial also suggests that after the November election, al-Nashiri will be added to a case involving the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings pending before New York City U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan.

It is really sad that we have an administration that does not care enough about the death of American sailors to prosecute the terrorists who killed them.  Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is a terrorist.  Terrorists should not have the rights and privileges of American citizens.  It is also unfortunate that the Obama Administration again has chosen to go against the general wishes of the American people and play politics with this prosecution.  If the Administration were truly comfortable with this decision, they would try al-Nashiri in New York before the November election.