AFTER ACTION REPORT: Committe Hearings on SCR 4, SR 17, HCR 6, SR 73

It was a packed room Tuesday for a Judiciary Committee hearing on SR17, SCR 4, and SR 73 (Patterson) A resolution to affirm Michigan's sovereignty under the 10th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not enumerated and granted to the federal government.

SCR 4 (Patterson) A concurrent resolution to affirm Michigan's sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not enumerated and granted to the federal government.

Patriots from Campaign for Liberty of Wayne and Livingston County were there as well as yours truly representing Grassroots in Michigan, representatives from Tea Party of West Michigan as well as others from across the state came to give testimony and support of the resolutions.

In addition Congressman Pete Hoekstra gave testimony for SR 73 "a resolution to memorialize the United States Congress to make certain intelligence information regarding Guantanamo Bay detention camp detainees available to the Governor and Michigan State Legislature."

In regards to with whether the Standish maximum security prison should house Guantanamo Bay prisoners. and Senator Tom George submitted written testimony and implored Governor Granholm to keep discussions open with the federal government.

Both Hoekstra and George are Republican candidates for governor. Congressman Pete Hoekstra the ranking Republican on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, says the state doesn't know enough about Guantanamo prisoners to make an informed decision and the danger they would impose on not just Standish but to the state. Additionally, the promise of jobs for Standish may be a moot point as the prison would be a Federal facility with Federal employees already employed by the Federal government. Senator Bruce Patterson (a Republican candidate for Attorney General) made the wry observation that Michigan has spend millions on its “Pure Michigan” campaign to bring others to the state and a prison for terrorists hardly fits the criteria for enticing people to Michigan. Here, here Senator!

The “unusual Liberal suspects” voiced their usual Liberal mantra of obfuscation and lack of knowledge.

Sen. Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing, the committee's minority vice chair, took a more neutral stance saying state officials need all the facts and realize while Hoekstra's views are based on experience they are only opinions.
"I would hope that before we say yes or no we would have a full understanding of what to expect," Whitmer said.

Hmmm let’s see Pete Hoekstra, the ranking GOP member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, “opinions” are pretty solid Ms Whitmer since he is privy to information that you are not and THAT is what SR 73 was about, obtaining more information.

Meanwhile downstairs, the Transportation Committee was hearing testimony on passage of House Concurrent Resolution No. 6.(Opsommer)

A concurrent resolution to memorialize the President, the Congress, and the Department of Homeland Security of the United States to change requirements, agreements, and memorandums of understanding relating to the creation of Enhanced Drivers Licenses.

Whereas, The Department of Homeland Security is currently requiring that any state that wishes to create an Enhanced Drivers License (EDL) as a result of passage of the federal Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) must create an EDL that incorporates what the federal government refers to as "facilitative technology." This ambiguous term has been defined in practice to mean the incorporation of unencrypted, long-range, radio-wave computer chip technology that allows for a unique citizen identification number that can be passively read through wallets, purses, doors, and cars without the owner's knowledge; and

Whereas, After Michigan made several attempts to create an EDL that would not need this technology, it became clear that the Department of Homeland Security would only allow Michigan the option to voluntarily abandon the entire EDL program, jeopardizing the state's economy. The WHTI's only true mandate was that Americans needed to prove their citizenship in order to reenter into the United States. Facilitative technology was never required by Congress, places technology contracts over security, and is an example of departmental overreach and encroachment onto states' rights; and

Whereas, The driver license information of Michigan citizens would be shared with the governments of Canada and Mexico via the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) and EDL agreements. However, how it would be shared is ambiguous and needs to be defined so that we can ensure that potential corruption in foreign bureaucracies does not result in identity theft or other security concerns for U.S. citizens. There is currently little congressional oversight of the SPP, again placing a single department’s bureaucracy largely in charge of rules and regulations that significantly impact the states and their citizens; now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That we memorialize the President, the Congress, and the Department of Homeland Security of the United States to change requirements, agreements, and memorandums of understanding relating to the creation of Enhanced Drivers Licenses to help address these concerns. We formally call for the Department of Homeland Security to change its rules so that EDLs can be created that do not need to contain what it characterizes as "facilitative technology"; and be it further

Resolved, That copies of this resolution be transmitted to the President of the United States Senate, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the Department of Homeland Security, and the members of the Michigan congressional delegation.

As many folks didn’t know about the Committee Meeting on HCR 6, I was busy handing out comment cards for passage of HCR 6 and running the filled out cards down to the Transportation Committee room.

After testimony and a vote, SR17, SCR 4, HCR 6 and SR 73 were all voted out of committee!

The testimony about Gitmo prisoners and HCR 6 dovetailed with the need for Michigan to assert her 10th Amendment sovereignty and as a means of breaking unconstitutional federal control over the States by basically bribing with money or the withholding of Federal money, which as one gentlemen from Campaign form Liberty pointed out the Federal government took from the states, to go in a direction that we can not or should not properly go. We Michiganders, the citizens who live here, work here, raise our families here and love Michigan are the best arbitrators to decide what is best for us and our state, not people in a far-away city called Washington D.C. and we are Constitutionally entitled to do so!

A good day for Michigan…onward…just in as of today SR 73 was ADOPTED AS SUBSTITUTED S-1 in the Senate

Gitmo's Ghosts

IBD
Friday, January 23, 2009

A Gitmo detainee released at Saudi Arabia's request has re-upped with al-Qaida and is now its chief of operations in Yemen. So, again, why do we want to empty the place?

If we bounce the rest of these terrorists out of Gitmo, as the president wants to do within a year, we risk recycling even more dangerous fanatics back into the jihad against us.

These people like to commit suicide. Why are we so anxious to do the same?

Gitmo terrorist Said Ali al-Shihri was released to Saudi in 2007. Within no time, he was back on the terror circuit. In fact, the FBI now suspects he helped plan last year's deadly bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital.

He's one of at least 30 former Gitmo inmates who have resumed terrorist activities as part of the Taliban or al-Qaida, despite signing pledges to renounce violence. (Yes, we're really that dumb.)

The releases have come amid a steady stream of complaints from the media, the ACLU and the Saudis (who have a disproportionate number locked up there) about the treatment of the detainees, who are tortured daily with a limited menu of halal meals, paperback-only copies of the Quran and hard plastic soccer balls.

The Saudis assured us we could trust these hardened killers in their care, because they had a rehab program to turn them into nonviolent, productive members of society.

But the Saudi "reintegration program" for repatriated Gitmo terrorists conditions their release on an agreement not to attack the Kingdom. It's OK, however, for them to attack the West.

And that's exactly what al-Shihri did — after he went through the Saudi rehab program, which includes monthly stipends, cars, jobs and resortlike housing featuring pools and volleyball courts.

Sounds more like a resort: If we didn't know better, our ally is actually rewarding our enemies, and rehabbing them for future battle.

Many of the remaining 245-plus Gitmo detainees are Saudis and Yemenis. But fear not, Yemen also has a rehab program for terrorists that's similar to the Saudis. And one that's partly funded by the U.S. (as if these rich oil countries swimming in petro dollars can't finance their own anti-terror programs).

Yemen is the same government that secretly released a USS Cole bombing suspect not too long ago. "The lesson here is, whoever receives former Guantanamo detainees needs to keep a close eye on them," a U.S. official was quoted saying.

That clearly is not going to happen. We can't even trust ally Kuwait, which recently freed a Gitmo terrorist we'd released to its custody only to watch him attack innocents in Iraq. Not long after renouncing jihad, Abdullah Salim Ali al-Ajmi turned around and blew up a police station there in a suicide mission.

The real lesson is: Don't release these killers into anyone's care. Keep them locked up in Cuba or they'll just resurface with al-Qaida or the Taliban and attack us again.

Some argue that there's a new commander in chief now, and new rules in the war on terror. So deal with it.

While it is his prerogative to change the rules, the enemy is operating under old rules — 1,400-year-old rules, to be exact — and it's not changing its tactics. And it would like nothing better than to have 245 more of its battle-hardened dogs return to the front line.

If the new commander in chief is not careful, Gitmo's ghosts may come back to haunt us all.


I have one postscript to this article, I don't believe Gitmo's ghosts MAY come back to haunt us I believe they WILL come back to haunt us!

Think, if possible, like a terrorist for a moment, if you just heard that the new untested president thinks that releasing the enemy is the right thing to do, wouldn't that give you the green light to your next attack?

When Bill Clinton pulled out of Mogadishu after our troops were attacked and the dead bodies of our soldiers desecrated, Osama bin Laden saw this as a sign of weakness and began to plot 9/11.

In a October 2001 interview between Al-Jazeera television correspondent Tayseer Alouni and Osama Bin Laden just one month after 9/11 Bin Laden states:

BIN LADEN: We experienced the Americans through our brothers who went into combat against them in Somalia, for example. We found they had no power worthy of mention. There was a huge aura over America -- the United States -- that terrified people even before they entered combat. Our brothers who were here in Afghanistan tested them, and together with some of the mujahedeen in Somalia, God granted them victory. America exited dragging its tails in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing.

America left faster than anyone expected.

Bin Laden never believed George Bush would respond with a show of force because Bill Clinton retreated as the response in Mogadishu.

After 9/11 Bin Laden knew he was wrong. However George Bush is longer our president. If you recall, during the election it was Joe Biden, Barack Obama's own running mate who said, that Barack Obama would be tested.

This is the first test on the WOT for his administration and to our enemies, he passed with flying colors!

Be on the alert, friends

OBAMA WATCH: Stem Cell, Abortion, Gitmo, Drilling

Obama planning US trials for Guantanamo detainees

By MATT APUZZO and LARA JAKES JORDAN
WASHINGTON (AP)


President-elect Obama's advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice.

During his campaign, Obama described Guantanamo as a "sad chapter in American history" and has said generally that the U.S. legal system is equipped to handle the detainees. But he has offered few details on what he planned to do once the facility is closed.

Under plans being put together in Obama's camp, some detainees would be released and many others would be prosecuted in U.S. criminal courts.

A third group of detainees — the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information — might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks. Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans aren't final.

The move would be a sharp deviation from the Bush administration, which established military tribunals to prosecute detainees at the Navy base in Cuba and strongly opposes bringing prisoners to the United States.

Obama's Republican challenger, John McCain, had also pledged to close Guantanamo. But McCain opposed criminal trials, saying the Bush administration's tribunals should continue on U.S. soil.

Obama Weighs Quick Undoing of Bush Policy

New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY
November 9, 2008

CHICAGO — President-elect Barack Obama is poised to move swiftly to reverse actions that President Bush took using executive authority, and his transition team is reviewing limits on stem cell research and the expansion of oil and gas drilling, among other issues, members of the team said Sunday.

As Mr. Obama prepared to make his first post-election visit to the White House on Monday, his advisers were compiling a list of policies that could be reversed by the executive powers of the new president. The assessment is under way, aides said, but a full list of policies to be overturned will not be announced by Mr. Obama until he confers with new members of his cabinet....

In January 2001, on his first full day in office, Mr. Bush reinstated the so-called global gag rule, initiated during the Reagan administration and overturned by President Bill Clinton, which prohibited taxpayer dollars from being given to international family planning groups that perform abortions and provide abortion counseling. After Mr. Obama’s victory last week, the Center for Reproductive Rights delivered a 23-page memorandum to his transition team, calling for “bold policy change,” including a repeal of the gag rule....

The idea of turning the auto industry’s crisis into a chance to enact changes with energy and environmental benefits is one that Mr. Emanuel has promoted in Congress. But he said that Mr. Obama had yet to settle on his proposals or whether he would announce them before he was sworn in.

“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” Mr. Emanuel said in an interview on Sunday. “They are opportunities to do big things.”...

The Bureau of Land Management is poised to open about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling, a plan that the Bush administration has argued would not harm the land. Environmentalists have opposed the idea, a sentiment echoed by Mr. Podesta on Sunday. ...They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah that they’re going to try to do right as they are walking out the door. I think that’s a mistake.”...

Mr. Bush used his first prime-time address, on Aug. 9, 2001, to announce his decision (technically a policy pronouncement and not an executive order) to permit federal financing for human embryonic stem cell research, albeit with strict limitations. Scientists and patient advocates have spent years pressing him to loosen the restrictions; Mr. Bush has twice vetoed legislation that would have done so.

“It will have been eight years that we have been operating in a limited funding environment,” said Larry Soler, a board member of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, an umbrella group representing 100 organizations. “I think everyone in the scientific community and the patient community is geared up and expecting this and excited to make this happen. It’s been a long struggle.”