It matters little what he was referencing, the question was clear -
"Can you give me a case in United States history where an enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in a civilian court ?" Furthermore, who are these "co-conspirators" of which you speak ? Oh, so now all enemies, that is, those who take up arms against this country, foreign or domestic are now "co-conspirators" NOT enemy combatants ? If that's the case, is it any surprise why we're all plugged up in process of the courts instead of concentrating all of our efforts on defeating a common enemy.
Someone should explain RICO to who ? and what is "little more" than giving captured foreign enemy combatants Miranda Rights and affording each a trial in American civil courts ? What if we, the U.S.of A. were to one day gather (capture) 10,000, 50,000, 250,000 armed combatants, that is, non citizens taking up arms against America, you mean to tell me that you would offer each their Miranda Rights ?:1orglaugh
You don't ..... really ..... do you ?
I want to label your response clueless or willful ignorance but I'll refrain from the disrespect.
But a couple of questions to illustrate my point. Was KSM caught on a "battlefield"? What were we after KSM for? Fighting us on a battlefield OR because he was a co-conspirator and mastermind of crimes???
A couple of facts. We don't try those suspected of crimes in American "civil courts". "Enemy combatant" is merely a status adopted by the Bush administration that they then widely defined to include many circumstances that don't apply to the battlefield. So when Graham words a question with his qualifiers like, "caught on the battlefield" and "enemy combatant" he's doing that to narrowly define the circumstance as one which hasn't existed. When in reality many of these people fall into to the same category as any fugitive or criminal merely arrested at some house, airport or otherwise (like KSM, Moussoui, Reed, etc.).
Like asking can we cite a time before when "Facetious" was caught wearing a polka dot shirt, polka dot bow tie, red foamed nose, baggy striped pants and oversized shoes to a Sarah Palin book signing....(maybe the likelihood of that makes it a bad example of a rare circumstance..)
Point being, Graham is merely using qualifiers to trump the broader, more realistic question of whether we've ever tried suspected terrorists and their accomplices in our criminal justice system. To which the answer to that is clearly "yes", circumstances of their arrest or capture notwithstanding.
Frankly Holder has an enormous mess to cleanup in terms how to deal with the nonsensical strategy Bush implemented to try some of these people once they were captured.
For example, KSM wasn't captured on a battlefield nor by US forces/agents. He was arrested by Pakistani ISI which defeats the whole "battlefield" scenario. He was then stupidly charged with war crimes when he was allegedly guilty of the same things Mouissoui was tried and found guilty of in the US criminal justice system.
The simple question for Graham would be why try KSM differently from the way we've tried the "Blind Sheik" and Mouissoui?
