Thread: Andrew McCarthy's Letter to Attorney General Holder

Andrew McCarthy's Letter to Attorney General Holder
May 1, 2009



By email (to the Counterterrorism Division) and by regular mail:

The Honorable Eric H. Holder, Jr.
Attorney General of the United States
United States Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Dear Attorney General Holder:

This letter is respectfully submitted to inform you that I must decline the invitation to participate in the May 4 roundtable meeting the President’s Task Force on Detention Policy is convening with current and former prosecutors involved in international terrorism cases.

An invitation was extended to me by trial lawyers from the Counterterrorism Section, who are members of the Task Force, which you are leading.

The invitation email (of April 14) indicates that the meeting is part of an ongoing effort to identify lawful policies on the detention and disposition of alien enemy combatants—or what the Department now calls “individuals captured or apprehended in connection with armed conflicts and counterterrorism operations.â€

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was most notable for leading the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others.

The defendants were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and planning a series of attacks against New York City landmarks.[1] He also contributed to the prosecutions of terrorists who bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, resigning from the Justice Department in 2003.

McCarthy is currently a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, serving as the director of the FDD's Center for Law and Counterterrorism.

He has served as an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, and is also a conservative opinion columnist who writes for National Review and Commentary.

He has defended the practice of waterboarding as not necessarily being torture in some situations to prosecute the War on Terror[2][3] whilst admitting that "waterboarding is close enough to torture that reasonable minds can differ on whether it is torture".[4]

During the 2008 Presidential election campaign, Andrew McCarthy has written a number of posts on the National Review's Corner stating that he thinks that the Democratic Presidential candidate is not serious about protecting U.S. national security against threats from radical Islam and elsewhere, and that Obama has a number of troubling ties and associations with leftist radicals.

In an opinion posted on the blog 'the Corner' on 10/22/08 [5], Mr. McCarthy wrote "I believe that the issue of Obama's personal radicalism, including his collaboration with radical, America-hating Leftists, should have been disqualifying."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_C._McCarthy

I say Good For Him!!

It's great to see people who are NOT afraid of this administration and are also not afraid to say so.