Susan Crabtree of the Hill newspaper is reporting that 20 GOP Senators have written the President urging him declare accused terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab an enemy combatant and have him tried in a Military Commissions Court instead of the Federal Court he plead not guilty in today.

The grandstanding Republican Senators are arguing that Mr. Abdulmutallab should be interrogated more intensely by the military; even though the Obama administration has been clear, they will not use the torture techniques known as “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”. Somehow, these know-nothing Senators feel that the military, which are bound by the Army Field manual and have significantly less experience and success in interrogation can do a better job than the F.B.I.

This fails to take into account the fact that Mr. Abdulmutallab has already sung like a bird about the plot, who recruited him and where he got the explosives. The Department of Homeland Security has said Mr. Abdulmutallab had provided actionable intelligence in his normal criminal interrogation. So what is left that the GOP Torture Caucus wants to find out?

Not a lot, the article says;

Critical questions, the senators argue, remain unanswered, such as whether Abdulmutallab obtained money for the operation, and if so, from whom; the identities of all the people who assisted him; and how he trained for the attempted bombing.

None of these issue seem truly critical to me, but then I am not a fear mongering torture enthusiast like some of the GOP. Still you know what this is; it is the same fear mongering the Republicans have been trying to sell for years. The idea that the party who was in charge of the White House during 9/11 and the anthrax terror attacks and released the men who now are running Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula should be trusted to keep you safe is ridiculous on the face of it. Nevertheless, that does not keep them from playing politics with national security. After all, to be a GOP Senator these days means you have to talk and act like a politician with very little brain.

The floor is yours.