Political Quotes

“I thank the Senator from New Hampshire who has been a great leader on this issue. Let me just tell my colleagues what drives my thinking. I think we are at war--I don't think it, I believe it. I hope my colleagues believe it too, and I know America is part of the battlefield because the enemy would like to destroy our country. If we capture an al-Qaida operative overseas, does anybody in this body suggest that we should give them a lawyer or read them their rights? In World War II, if we had captured a Nazi soldier overseas and started saying they had the right to remain silent and we would give them a lawyer, even though Miranda didn't exist at the time, people would have run us out of town. So if we believe we can kill an American citizen who has joined al- Qaida--the Awlaki case, where the President of the United States made an executive decision under the rule of the law, not through a court decision, to target an American citizen who had aligned themselves with the enemy--then if we can kill them, which is pretty indefinite, why can't we capture and hold them? Now, that would be the dumbest thing in the history of the world for a nation to say: We all acknowledge the executive branch's power to target an American citizen who has aligned themselves with the enemy. We can kill them overseas, we can capture them overseas, we can interrogate them about what they know about future attacks, but when they get here we have to treat them as a common criminal.…”