10 Comments Add your own

• 1. bannernews  |  November 17th, 2009 at 6:47 pm

  Now Jim Sacia is calling Kirk and Manzullo out. “We would bBe idiots to turn this down”.

• 2. Mr. Funfsinn  |  November 17th, 2009 at 8:15 pm

  “If President Obama, is going to do this, we are literally idiots if we don’t pursue this opportunity.”

  - He doesn’t get it that Obama is poking at him and his party because Obama won this Congressional and his Legislative District. Look at what they did in NY-23. I bet that there are A LOT of people who can’t wait until they leave this state.

• 3. FrankyG  |  November 17th, 2009 at 9:44 pm

  JOBS_JOBS_JOBS_JOBS_JOBS_JOBS_JOBS_JOBS_JOBS_JOBS

  Government Monkeys….
  Kirk and Manzullo are in error on this. BIG TIME!

  Bring on the Head-Choppers…i dont know ANY real American that Fears anything other than a chance to earn a living and a fair Shake.
  Congressman Manzullo, you have much bigger fish to fry….
  this is a non-issue.

• 4. shawnnews  |  November 17th, 2009 at 11:53 pm

  I fail to see how Manzullo has earned a reputation as someone who is a champion of industry and manufacturing. Fill me in. I think that’s just something that gets repeated a lot that hasn’t translated into very much local activity.

• 5. Milton Waddams  |  November 17th, 2009 at 11:59 pm

  Might want to re-read your post there, FrankyG. I don’t think any “real” Americans fear a chance to earn a living and a fair shake.

• 6. Harley Lowrider  |  November 18th, 2009 at 6:21 am

  How come no one is talking about the NUKE PLANTS or did everyone forget about them ? do you think that they cant be hit ?

• 7. snuss  |  November 18th, 2009 at 7:10 am

  BTW, read the following letter to B. Hussein Obama, opposing bringing the terrorists to New York.

  November 9, 2009

  President Barack Obama
  The White House
  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
  Washington, D.C. 20500

  Dear President Obama:

  On September 11, 2001, the entire world watched as 19 men hijacked four commercial airliners, attacking passengers and killing crew members, and then turned the fully-fueled planes into missiles, flying them into the World Trade Center twin towers, the Pentagon and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 3,000 of our fellow human beings died in two hours. The nation’s commercial aviation system ground to a halt. Lower Manhattan was turned into a war zone, shutting down the New York Stock Exchange for days and causing tens of thousands of residents and workers to be displaced. In nine months, an estimated 50,000 rescue and recovery workers willingly exposed themselves to toxic conditions to dig out the ravaged remains of their fellow citizens buried in 1.8 million tons of twisted steel and concrete.

  The American people were rightly outraged by this act of war. Whether the cause was retribution or simple recognition of our common humanity, the words “Never Forget” were invoked in tearful or angry rectitude, defiantly written in the dust of Ground Zero or humbly penned on makeshift memorials erected all across the land. The country was united in its determination that these acts should not go unmarked and unpunished.

  Eight long years have passed since that dark and terrible day. Sadly, some have forgotten the promises we made to those whose lives were taken in such a cruel and vicious manner.

  We have not forgotten. We are the husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers and other family members of the victims of these depraved and barbaric attacks, and we feel a profound obligation to ensure that justice is done on their behalf. It is incomprehensible to us that members of the United States Congress would propose that the same men who today refer to the murder of our loved ones as a “blessed day” and who targeted the United States Capitol for the same kind of destruction that was wrought in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, should be the beneficiaries of a social compact of which they are not a part, do not recognize, and which they seek to destroy: the United States Constitution.

  We adamantly oppose prosecuting the 9/11 conspirators in Article III courts, which would provide them with the very rights that may make it possible for them to escape the justice which they so richly deserve. We believe that military commissions, which have a long and honorable history in this country dating back to the Revolutionary War, are the appropriate legal forum for the individuals who declared war on America. With utter disdain for all norms of decency and humanity, and in defiance of the laws of warfare accepted by all civilized nations, these individuals targeted tens of thousands of civilian non-combatants, brutally killing 3,000 men, women and children, injuring thousands more, and terrorizing millions.

  It is morally offensive to offer Constitutional protections to individuals charged with murdering 3,000 individuals, in essence, to jeopardize justice for war crimes victims, in order to make an appeal to the Muslim world. The use of Article III courts after the 1993 World Trade Center attack didn’t stop any of the subsequent terrorist plots, including the attack on Khobar Towers, 19 Americans killed, the 1998 East African Embassy bombing, 212 killed, the USS Cole bombing, 17 sailors killed. The attacks of 9/11 were a resounding rebuke to the view that federal courts were an appropriate counterterrorism strategy. Afterward, we didn’t send law enforcement personnel to apprehend the perpetrators, we sent the United States military, who captured them and held them pursuant to the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF).

  The American people do not support the use of our cherished federal courts as a stage by the “mastermind of 9/11″ and his co-conspirators to condemn this nation and rally their fellow terrorists the world over. As one New York City police detective, who lost 60 fellow officers on 9/11, told members of the Department of Justice’s Detainee Policy Task Force at a meeting last June, “You people are out of touch. You need to hear the locker room conversations of the people who patrol your streets and fight your wars.”

  On May 21, you stated that military commissions, promulgated by congressional legislation and recently reformed with even greater protections for defendants, are a legal and appropriate forum to try individuals captured pursuant the 2001 AUMF, passed by Congress in response to the attack on America. Nevertheless, you announced a new policy requiring that Al-Qaeda terrorists should be tried in Article III courts “whenever feasible.”

  We strongly object to the creation of a two-tier system of justice for terrorists in which those responsible for the death of thousands on 9/11 will be treated as common criminals and afforded the kind of platinum due process accorded American citizens, yet members of Al Qaeda who aspire to kill Americans but who do not yet have blood on their hands, will be treated as war criminals. To date, you have offered no explanation or justification for this contradiction, even as you readily acknowledge that the 9/11 conspirators, now designated “unprivileged enemy belligerents,” are appropriately accused of war crimes. We believe that this two-tier system, in which war criminals receive more due process protections than would-be war criminals, will be mocked and rejected in the court of world opinion as an ill-conceived contrivance aimed, not at justice, but at the appearance moral authority.

  The public has a right to know that prosecuting the 9/11 conspirators in federal courts will result in a plethora of legal and procedural problems that will severely limit or even jeopardize the successful prosecution of their cases. Ordinary criminal trials do not allow for the exigencies associated with combatants captured in war, in which evidence is not collected with CSI-type chain-of-custody standards. None of the 9/11 conspirators were given the Miranda warnings mandated in Article III courts. Prosecutors contend that the lengthy, self-incriminating tutorials Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others gave to CIA interrogators about 9/11 and other terrorist operations–called “pivotal for the war against Al-Qaeda” in a recently released, declassified 2005 CIA report–may be excluded in federal trials. Further, unlike military commissions, all of the 9/11 cases will be vulnerable in federal court to defense motions that their prosecutions violate the Speedy Trial Act. Indeed, the judge presiding in the case of Ahmed Ghailani, accused of participating in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Kenya, killing 212 people, has asked for that issue to be briefed by the defense. Ghailani was indicted in 1998, captured in Pakistan in 2004, and held at Guantanamo Bay until 2009.

  Additionally, federal rules risk that classified evidence protected in military commissions would be exposed in criminal trials, revealing intelligence sources and methods and compromising foreign partners, who will be unwilling to join with the United States in future secret or covert operations if doing so will risk exposure in the dangerous and hostile communities where they operate. This poses a clear and present danger to the public. The safety and security of the American people is the President’s highest duty.

  Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “the challenges of terrorism trials are overwhelming.” Mr. Mukasey, formerly a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, presided over the multi-defendant terrorism prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abel Rahman, the cell that attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 and conspired to attack other New York landmarks. In addition to the evidentiary problems cited above, he expressed concern about courthouse and jail facility security, the need for anonymous jurors to be escorted under armed guard, the enormous costs associated with the use of U.S. marshals necessarily deployed from other jurisdictions, and the danger to the community which, he says, will become a target for homegrown terrorist sympathizers–like the recent Fort Hood shooter–or embedded Al Qaeda cells.

  Finally, there is the sickening prospect of men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed being brought to the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, or the courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, just a few blocks away from the scene of carnage eight years ago, being given a Constitutionally mandated platform upon which he can mock his victims, exult in the suffering of their families, condemn the judge and his own lawyers, and rally his followers to continue jihad against the men and women of the U.S. military, fighting and dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan on behalf of us all.

  There is no guarantee that Mr. Mohammed and his co-conspirators will plead guilty, as in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, whose prosecution nevertheless took four years, and who is currently attempting to recant that plea. Their attorneys will be given wide latitude to mount a defense that turns the trial into a shameful circus aimed at vilifying agents of the CIA for alleged acts of “torture,” casting the American government and our valiant military as a force of evil instead of a force for good in places of the Muslim world where Al Qaeda and the Taliban are waging a brutal war against them and the local populations. For the families of those who died on September 11, the most obscene aspect of giving Constitutional protections to those who planned the attacks with the intent of inflicting maximum terror on their victims in the last moments of their lives will be the opportunities this affords defense lawyers to cast their clients as victims.

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators are asking to plead guilty, now, before a duly-constituted military commission. Mr. President, the families of their victims have a right to know, why don’t you let them?

  Respectfully submitted,

  See the list of the signatures of 100,000 New Yorkers, who agree with this letter’s sentiments. Many of those who signed lost friends and/or family, in the 9/11 attacks.
  See: http://www.thebravest.com/ObamaLetter110909.htm

• 8. Andy Martin  |  November 18th, 2009 at 12:00 pm

  U. S. Senate candidate Andy Martin calls Mark Kirk the “Crybaby Candidate” for senator

  Martin says Kirk’s pandering to public fears about bringing Al-Qaeda prisoners to Illinois is “nauseating”

  NEWS FROM:
  ANDY MARTIN /2010
  “The name you can trust”
  Republican for U. S. Senator
  30 E. Huron Street, Suite 4406
  Chicago, IL 60611-4723
  (312) 440-4124
  www.AndyforUSSenator.com
  www.AndyforUSSenator.blogspot.com
  www.AndyforUSSenator.wordpress.com

  www.MarkKirk.us
  www.IllinoisHighSpeedTrains.com

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

  Andy Martin says Kirk is using his usual campaign tactic of pandering to public fears to win votes in the senate primary

  Martin ridicules Mark Kirk for suggesting that “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” is about to move its offices to “Al-Qaeda in Illinois”

  Martin says the last thing Illinois needs is “Crybaby Kirk” in Washington

  (CHICAGO)(November 16, 2009) One of the downsides, or condign punishments if you will, of being a candidate for office is that you have to listen to your opponents’ speeches, over and over again. Sunday I was nauseated by Mark Kirk’s crybaby appeal to public fear over incarcerating Al-Qaeda prisoners in Illinois.

  There are two aspects to the Al-Qaeda-prisoner-in-Illinois issue.

  First, bringing Al-Qaeda prisoners to a vacant Illinois prison would create 1,000 new high-paying federal jobs. Northwest Illinois is starved for quality employment. Federal jobs come with goods salaries, excellent benefits and outstanding retirement payments. Where’s the problem with that?

  The second issue is whether these dangerous prisoners can be handled properly. Guess what? Illinois has been handling the “worse of the worst” for decades. The nation’s successor to Alcatraz Penitentiary was built in Marion, Illinois. Have you heard any southern Illinoisans crying lately that desperate criminals are housed in their midst? No, they are too busy cashing their paychecks.

  During World War II, German POW’s were housed in Missouri. How do I know? After the war, the University of Illinois purchased the POW camp and trucked it to Memorial Stadium for married student housing. Is there any record that Missourians were crying out of fear that “Nazis” were housed in their state? I seem to remember the Nazis killed a lot of people too, a lot more than Al-Qaeda.

  Or is it all right to house “white” Germans in the United States, but it is also acceptable conduct to a campaign against housing “dark” Muslims under the same conditions? Mark Kirk has a history of pandering to racial stereotypes. “There you go again, Mark.”

• 9. Quentink  |  November 18th, 2009 at 1:01 pm

  FrankyG is right. Think about this. If you were one of the Taliban and could escape from Thomson, would you want to be on your own in NW Illinois? How many would volunteer for that manhunt? In other words I wouldn’t give him much chances of surving too long.

• 10. Craig Knauss  |  November 18th, 2009 at 10:36 pm

  Harley no-name, Quit worrying about the nuke plants. They have incredible security. If you don’t believe me, try getting into one of them sometime. Go ahead. Try. I’ll watch for your obituary.

  And Juice, could you possibly make a stupider comment? Where did you get this no manhunt nonsense? Or do you just like to make stuff up?

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