Is there not a danger if released these people would go on to commit terrorist atrocities?
There's a danger if I release you, that you'll commit terrorist atrocities. That doesn't mean I get the right to lock you up today. And if you happen to grow a beard and tell me you're Muslim, then apparently that makes you more dangerous. Again, it doesn't give me the right to lock you up. For the last thousand years or so, we've had a perfectly sensible approach to dealing with people who may commit crimes, and it's not the movie “Minority Report.” You don't say, “Well, I see that chap over there, and I think maybe he'll commit a crime sometime in the future.” And the idea that somehow today we need a new system is ridiculous. The idea that Al Qaida, for example, a group of people who back in 2001, you could have written all of their names on one sheet of paper, that somehow they're more dangerous than Adolf Hitler and all the armies of World War II, you know, that's just ridiculous. And the only people who can pretend that are people who've never read a history book. And we developed all of the human rights law after World War II, and we developed it through the Cold War when the Soviets wanted to blow us all off the map. And the idea that we need to jettison all of that because there are a few lunatics out there who want to attack the West, you know, that's just not supportable; it's absurd.
