(2006-09-28) — House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, today criticized former President Bill Clinton for what she called “his failure to connect the dots and do more to protect terrorist detainee rights before 9/11.”

Rep. Pelosi’s remarks came in the wake of Congressional passage of new terrorist detainee legislation that would enable U.S. troops and intelligence officers to aggressively question suspected terrorists, and would provide for trial by military tribunal for enemy combatants.

“None of this needed to happen,” said a visibly shaken Rep. Pelosi, “In the years before 9/11, the Clinton administration utterly neglected the opportunity to push legislation that would have prevented the horror of secret CIA detention facilities and the desperate inconvenience of Guantanamo Bay.”

The presumptive House Majority Leader said that since 9/11, cultural insensitivity has fueled a disregard for the Constitution that makes terrorist detainees among the most vulnerable members of society.

“People have become so obsessed with not being blown up,” she said, “that they’re willing to deny Constitutional rights to a foreign person just because he happens to belong to a group that has sworn to destroy America.”

Mrs. Pelosi suggested the nation has “lost its moral compass,” and should remember the Golden Rule which says, “do not unto others until others have already done unto you and you can prove it in court.”

She also paraphrased the Bible in saying, “If your enemy saws off your head, turn to him also the other head, unless you don’t have a second head, in which case, offer him an arm and a leg.”

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