Washington (CNSNews.com) – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), just back from a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said he and other senators found operational “confusion” among U.S. military officials on how to handle detained enemy combatants.
 
“From the top to the bottom, the military, the American military people that we talked to, indicated some confusion, operationally, about what you do when you detain a terrorist,” McConnell said at a press conference on Tuesday.
 
The Republican delegation, which McConnell led, included Republican Sens. Mike Crapo (Idaho), Roger Wicker (Miss.), and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), the Senate GOP Conference vice-chairwoman
 
After pointing out that a U.S. military general declined to answer questions about the handling of insurgent detainees without the presence of his lawyer, the minority leader said: “This operational confusion has . . . been created, it strikes me, unnecessarily and, frankly, dangerously, by the administration.”
 
McConnell criticized the administration, in particular, for recently handing over the so-called underwear bomber, Nigerian terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to criminal courts rather than to the military.
 
“This sort of preoccupation, if you will, that we see on full display here in the U.S., with the example of the Christmas would-be bomber being turned over — not to the military for interrogation, but to criminal courts — and told he is entitled to a lawyer, is a mentality that I think is very dangerous in the war on terror,” the minority leader said.
 
McConnell said the administration is wrongly preoccupied with detainee “rights.”
 
“We see this preoccupation with prisoners’ rights both on foreign battlefield[s] and here at home that seems to be consuming the administration in this war on terror,” he explained. “I think it’s wrong-headed.”
 
McConnell added that treating captured terrorists as if they were American citizens who have committed a crime is not the right way to “conduct the war.”  
 
“To not be allowed to properly interrogate and to detain, without some of the concerns that you might have if you were an American citizen here in the United States who is under arrest for robbing a convenience store or something, strikes me as a pretty wrong-headed way to conduct the war,” McConnell said.
 
The Kentucky senator concluded by stating that the prison for terrorists in Guantanaamo Bay (Gitmo) should not be closed and that enemy detainees should be tried by military commissions.
 
At the press conference, Sen. Crapo said:  “It was very clear that there was uncertainty among our military personnel as to exactly how they are required now and going to be required in the future to deal with the handling of detainees.”

Sen. Wicker, who also visited Afghanistan as part of the GOP delegation led by the senate minority leader, repeated the alleged confusion created by the Obama administration.

A task force commissioned as part of President Obama’s January 2009 Executive Order to revise terrorist detention policy, interrogation tactics, and close down Gitmo, issued a preliminary report in July 2009 summarizing their legal views for the handling of enemy combatants.

“When asked the question , ‘What do we do with captured enemy combatants?’ it was clear that the, the answer is confusion and uncertainty on the part of our troops” and the Afghan security forces,” said Wicker.
 
Wicker, however, pointed out that the confusion as to how to deal with enemy combatants is something that can be overcome.

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