Political Quotes

“Well, my belief is that most Americans would want our military being able to combat al-Qaida at home as much as they would abroad. I think most Americans would be very upset to hear that the military has no real role in combatting al-Qaida on our own shore, but we can do anything we want to them overseas. Frankly, there are very good people on our side who want to mandate that the military has custody, and no one else, so we never have to read Miranda rights. Quite frankly, there are people on the left, libertarians, well-meaning people, who want to prevent the idea of a person being held under military custody in the homeland because they do not think we are at war and this is really not the battlefield. What the Senator and I have done is to start with the presumption that focuses on intelligence gathering because the Senator and I are more worried about what they know about future attacks than how we are going to prosecute them. Under domestic criminal law, we can't hold someone indefinitely. The public safety law I will talk about in a bit, but I say to my good friend from California, the public safety exception was a very temporary ability to secure a crime scene. It was not written regarding terrorism. So our law enforcement officials cannot use the public safety exception to hold an al-Qaida operative for days and question them. The only way to do that legally is under the law of war. In every other war we have had that right, and we are about to change that.”