Political Quotes

“I appreciate the opportunity. This is a good debate. It is a fascinating discussion. I guess the way I look at this issue--and we will talk with Senator Levin in a bit--I have been a military lawyer for about 30 years, and the first thing you do in JAG school is have a discussion about the difference between the law of war and criminal law. Every military lawyer is taught from the very beginning of their career that law of war detention is designed to neutralize the enemy and to gather intelligence about the enemy. There is a reason that when we capture somebody in a war we do not give them a trial by jury, and we do not give them a lawyer. We have 3,000 people in American military custody in Afghanistan who were captured on the battlefield, and they are held under the law of war because we do not want to let them go back to killing us. And they are not given a lawyer because we are not trying to solve a crime; we are trying to win a war. Here is the question to my good friend from California: I do not want anyone to believe that under the law of war construct we have created over the last 7 or 8 years that you can be put in jail because you look like a Muslim, that you sound like a Muslim, that you have got a name Mohammad. What happened to Japanese-American citizens is they were put in military custody because we were all afraid and they looked like the enemy. That was not a high point in America. What are we talking about here?…”