Eric Holder recently had what he wants to be perceived as a really important interview about the domestic terror threat with Pierre Thomas of ABC News.
In the video at the ABC link, George Stephanopoulos's intro at Good Morning America describes Holder as "a pretty circumspect man," but that on the subject of domestic terror threats, "he doesn't seem to be pulling any punches."
Really? If that's the case, Holder must have said a lot of things which got left on ABC's cutting-room floor. That's because in the entire three-page story at ABC (it's easiest to prove the following by looking at the print version, which can only be obtained at the link), the following words never appear:
It seems virtually impossible that anyone who is serious about domestic terror threats could "successfully" avoid all of these words and still accurately and completely communicate the true nature of the threat we face. Thus, either Eric Holder wasn't as forthcoming as Stephanopoulos claims, or ABC put a great deal of effort into scrubbing his words.
The best clue that it's that latter is that the Attorney General still appears to be bitterly clinging to the notion that terrorists should have all the legal-defense rights of U.S. citizens. That's what I get from the last sentence in the following passage of ABC's report:
Turning to how terror suspects are tried, Holder said he still believes the "decision as to how people get prosecuted, where they get prosecuted, is an executive branch function. Even if those suspects are being held now at Guantanamo Bay. Holder said Congress should not be interfering with that.
"It's -- from my perspective -- a constitutional issue," he said.
That brings to mind another word that didn't come up in ABC's report: "Ghailani," as in Ahmed Ghailani, "the al Qaeda operative accused of playing a key role in the 1998 attacks on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania." Holder's attempt to try Ghailani in the American court system ended in mid-November, when a jury "acquitted Ghailani on 285 counts -- including ... (224) murder counts -- while convicting him on a single count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property."
In the third paragraph of ABC's report, Holder says, "What I am trying to do in this interview is to make people aware of the fact that the threat is real, the threat is different, the threat is constant." With all due respect, Mr. Holder, it would be helpful if you "made people aware of the threat" by actually naming it.
As to ABC's video coverage, the network played its politically correct part. Watch in amazement as ABC refers to ridiculously vague "homegrown radicals." "Radical cleric" Anwar Al Awlaki is never described as a believer in Islam or jihad. The ABC video does describe Awlaki as a possible influence on the Fort Hood murderer -- something that "somehow" didn't get into the print description of the interview. Why not?
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
