Ali Musa Daqduq is a Lebanese national and Hezbollah agent responsible for the 2007 kidnapping and murder of five American servicemen in Iraq. He’s been a prisoner there since early 2008, held in US custody. The US government turned custody of Daqduq over to the Iraqis, who declined to consent to his transfer out of the country.
The WSJ thinks that’s a very bad idea:
“We have sought and received assurances [from the Iraqi government] that he will be tried for his crimes,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
Mr. Vietor surely knows the likelier outcome is that Daqduq will be released or acquitted so that he can rejoin his comrades in Beirut or Tehran. The Iraqi government has already released some 50 other prisoners responsible for attacks on U.S. forces.
The Administration contends that its hands were tied by the U.S.-Iraq status-of-forces agreement negotiated by the Bush Administration, which required Iraq’s consent—not forthcoming—to remove any prisoners from the country. But it’s hard to see why that stipulation would apply to Daqduq, who is not an Iraqi citizen.
For all the brave talk of what’s been accomplished in Iraq – and what remains to be done – it sometimes seems to me like we are slinking away like thieves in the night, embarassed at having been caught defending our national interests.
Farewell to all that.
Watched a Vietnam anthology (again) the other night and the part about the “peace talks” certainly has some parallels to our Iraq exit. “Peace with honor”, ‘leaving a stable government capable of defending itself’, blah blah. Hope may not be a good strategy but it seems that it’s the current best option.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a special military tribunal for German spies in 1942. They were EXECUTED within two months of landing here. Why didn’t Presidents Bush or Obama do the same? Perhaps if their kids were out front…
Don’t go all Robert Graves on us there Lex. It is true that this administration finds it preferable to incinerate a terrorist–along with half a dozen perhaps innocent people around him, arguably guilty of no more than being within the kill zone of a Hellfire missile, than to capture and incarcerate the terrorist in Gitmo. I mean it’s so messy to do that–so like George Bush. The horror of it all. And our liberal friends don’t seem to mind incinerating innocent people so long as a progessive’s hand is at the helm. That’s just collateral damage after all, and it’s done with the best of politically correct intentions.
In some ways it reminds me of the furor over an LAPD acronym. The letters “NHI” or “no humans involved” would show up on police reports of investigations of domestic disturbances–or drive by shootings–in the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles.
My vote would have been for the .45 cent solution ……once that evolution was accomplished, he would likely cause a lot less trouble and been very easy to hand off….in a pine box.
The ONLY people who seem to be embarrassed are the Apologizer in Chief and his appointees. And I’m quite sure that they would be more than happy to have ALL this disagreeable coverage just go away by letting all the prisoners go.
The thought of what this Administration has done to dishonor the work and sacrifice of so many good men and women is enough to make strong men shudder.
SOB should have been shot trying to escape…”So sorry, we didn’t mean to kill him” (Big grins).
“.45 cent solution”…cheap at twice the price.
+9 or +5.56
or +7.62
Don’t forget to bill the family for ammo expended, the ChiComs do.