Today, Senate Democrats announced that the Senate will strip $80 million in funding for closing Guantanamo until the Obama administration devises a specific plan for transferring detainees. The move comes as conservatives are pushing the claim that Guantanamo “terrorists” could escape into Americans’ backyard if the facility is closed.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) declared in a press conference today, “We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.” In several tense back and forths with reporters, Reid said he opposes imprisoning detainees on U.S. soil, saying flatly, “We don’t want them around the United States”:

REID: I’m saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That’s very clear.

QUESTION: No one’s talking about releasing them. We’re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.

REID: Can’t put them in prison unless you release them.

QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? …

REID: I can’t make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.

Later, Reid repeated that he would not support Guantanamo detainees being transferred to U.S prisons:

QUESTION: But Senator, Senator, it’s not that you’re not being clear when you say you don’t want them released. But could you say — would you be all right with them being transferred to an American prison?

REID: Not in the United States.

A reporter then asked, “[I]f a detainee is adjudicated not to be a terrorist, could that detainee then enter the United States?” Reid refused to answer directly, saying, “Why don’t we wait for a plan from the president? All we’re doing now is nitpicking on language that I have given you. I’ve been as clear as I can.” After being peppered by questions, Reid joked, “I think I’ve had about enough of this.”

Reid said he wants Guantanamo closed, but his claim that he would not support transferring detainees to the U.S. clashes with this goal. Currently, dozens of convicted terrorists are being held securely in federal prisons, and the U.S. has already prosecuted 145 terrorism cases in federal court. Reid’s position aligns him with Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who also opposes “the transfer of the detainees to US soil.”

If not American prisons, where will detainees be sent after Guantanamo is closed?

Despite the notable absence of Sen. Arlen Specter — who pulled out due to a “scheduling conflict” — today’s Middle East Forum-sponsored Libel Lawfare conference went on as planned.

In a press release on Sen Specter’s withdrawal, MEF responded to charges from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) that the conference was an “anti-Islam” event:

The conference is not an anti-Islam event, but addresses the phenomenon of libel lawfare, being waged by Islamists who seek to censor discussion of Islam, radical Islam, terrorism, and the sources of terrorist funding….CAIR alleges that the conference is based on the premise that “American Muslims are involved in a concerted effort to suppress free speech by misusing the American legal system.” This is CAIR’s fantasy, not a view held by the conference organizers.

CAIR is demonstrating, once again, why such a conference as this one, protecting free speech from Islamists, is necessary.

Did you follow that? The point of the conference is not to say that American Muslims are involved in a concerted effort to suppress free speech, but the fact that American Muslims have expressed anger over the conference proves the need for a conference protecting free speech from Islamists. All doubletalk aside, a brief perusal of conference materials showed that American Muslims being involved in a concerted effort to suppress free speech by misusing the American legal system was, in fact, the intended message of the conference.

In her welcome address, Brooke Goldstein, the director of Middle East Forum’s Legal Project, seemed to be aware of the fact that holding a conference on the creeping threat of Islamists using the legal system to stifle speech critical of Islam amounted to a pretty strong refutation of the idea that Islamists are using the legal system to stifle speech critical of Islam, but she darkly warned that we might not even be able to have such a conference five years from now. (A panelist later responded “Or even one year from now!”)

Interestingly, in her description of various methods of “lawfare” Islamists use, Goldstein included the successful lawsuit brought by Palestinians against Israel for its “separation wall.” In 2004, the International Court of Justice found that the construction of the wall involved “the widespread confiscation and destruction of Palestinian property” violated international law and amounted to an illegal land grab. Whatever one thinks of the merits of the case or the ruling itself, it seems that the Palestinians fighting the occupation through the international legal system, rather than through terrorism, is something that should be applauded rather than condemned. It gives you an idea of the sort of careless conflation of movements and threats in which Middle East Forum specializes.

Speaking of careless conflation, neocon activist Frank Gaffney used his allotted time on the morning’s panel to discuss the threat to America posed by the twin forces of Islamic sharia — his personal obsession — and “secular transnationalists” like Harold Koh, President Obama’s nominee for the State Department’s legal adviser. “Our sovereignty and constitutional freedoms are under assault,” Gaffney said, “from what I think [are] best described as transnationalist forces. They come in two strains: The religious and the secular.”

GAFFNEY: Brooke has already mentioned one of the manifestations of the internationalists of the religious strain, in their effort to constrict free speech elsewhere and around the world, and in the US through sharia blasphemy laws. [...]

This is being made possible, both the sharia blasphemy program and the other aspects of sharia, of course by the secular strain of transnationalism, one that holds that the United States must be subject to international laws, rulings, and even norms. [...]

To put a fine point on it, we have before the United States Senate as we speak a nominee that is a radical adherent to this notion of secular transationalism, Harold Koh, the recently departed dean of the Yale Law School, who President Obama would like to have to be the State Department’s legal adviser, a position from which he would have unprecedented opportunities to promote this form of secular transationalism. And I think we will see much more of this sort of insinuation of this sharia programs, sharia blasphemy laws, and other forms of international norming in our society if indeed people like Harold Koh — who has also been bandied about as a prospective Supreme Court nominee — are given positions of great trust and influence. [...]

This, in other words ladies and gentlemen, constitutes a pincer movement, between the secularists on the one hand and the religious transnationalists on the other. Wielding lawfare as the Lilliputians wielded their tiny strands to secure and immobilize Gulliver, it is aimed at the very heart of our sovereignty and indeed our freedoms as they seek to remake the world in their image.

Watch it:

In recent days, conservatives have been on a media blitz accusing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) of lying last week when she said that she believed she had been “misled” by the CIA during intelligence briefings regarding the use of torture. Last night on Fox News’s On The Record, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) continued this blitz, arguing that Pelosi did not want to “take accountability and responsibility for the actions that she took in 2002, 2003″ and is instead simply “blaming the CIA.”

When host Greta Van Sustern pointed out that “CIA has not been perfect” in recent years, Hoekstra explained that in his view it is okay to criticize the agency’s performance, but it is another thing to accuse the CIA of having misled Congress:

HOEKSTRA: I think you do go back and you break it into two different issues. One is the performance, how well, they’re doing their job. The second is whether they have misled or lied to Congress, two very, very different issues.

Watch it:

Yesterday on CNN’s American Morning, Hoekstra made similar remarks, referring to Pelosi’s claims as “outrageous accusations.” He also appeared last night on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight and this morning on talk radio with Bill Bennett and Laura Ingraham.

Hoekstra’s repeated objections to Pelosi accusing the CIA of having lied to Congress is quite odd given the fact that he’s made nearly identical claims on multiple occasions. As Marcy Wheeler first noted, Hoekstra wrote a letter to President Bush in 2006 accusing the intelligence community of withholding information on their activities from Congress. “I have learned of some alleged Intelligence Community activities about which our committee has not been briefed,” Hoekstra wrote. He said that he believed the Bush administration’s failure to fully brief his committee could constitute “a violation of law“:

Similarly, in 2007, Hoekstra described a closed-door briefing by representatives from the intelligence community (including CIA) on the National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear capability, saying that the members “didn’t find [the briefers] forthcoming.” More recently, in November 2008, Hoekstra concluded that the CIA “may have been lying or concealing part of the truth” in testimony to Congress regarding a 2001 incident in which the CIA mistakenly killed an American citizen in Peru. “We cannot have an intelligence community that covers up what it does and then lies to Congress,” Hoekstra said of the incident.