Political Quotes

“Madam President, I wish to share a few thoughts on a matter of concern; that is, our national security and the procedure by which we are handling people we arrest who are attacking this country. It will be a bit of a follow-on to what Senator Bond of Missouri had to say. I disagree with my distinguished colleague, Senator Durbin, the assistant Democratic leader in the Senate. He is a member of the Judiciary Committee. I think he is wrong about that. I serve on the Judiciary Committee, too, and I would like to share a few thoughts. First, there has been a full-scale attempt to assert that President Bush tried most of the terrorists or terrorism-related cases that developed over the years in the normal civilian courts. That is true to some degree. I notice that in the 195 cases Senator Durbin said were tried in the Federal courts, he counted the Unabomber and Terry Nichols, one of the ones who blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building. There is a big distinction: The Unabomber was not officially at war with the United States, had not declared war on the United States as al-Qaida has, and the United States had not declared war on him or on Terry Nichols, who was unknown, I suppose, to anybody at the time he committed that crime and was tried. A lot of the other cases deal with such things as aiding a terrorist by providing money to some terrorist organization that supports terrorism, violating various complex Federal laws, and they are tried in Federal courts.…”