At the other end of the spectrum, some conservatives have called for treating terrorism-related cases — even those arising on American soil or involving citizens — as a military matter, holding a suspect indefinitely as an "enemy combatant" without a criminal defendants' rights.
Since then, though, advocates of treating terrorism like bank robbery have tried to nibble away at the legality and morality of – and the political support for – the war on terror.
Hereby, there exist two major groups of states treating terrorism either as a military threat or a criminal activity.
In a speech yesterday to the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told the audience that a government-wide task force is reviewing options for how to treat terrorism suspects, as well as standards for the interrogation of detainees.
Another would dramatically alter U.S. policy for treating captured terrorism suspects by granting them a final recourse to the federal courts but stripping them of some key legal rights.
Over the past year, Republicans have sharply criticized the Obama administration for treating some terrorism suspects -- including United States citizens arrested on United States soil, like Faisal Shahzad, the man accused of attempting to detonate a car bomb in Times Square this month -- as criminal defendants rather than as military detainees under wartime rules.
For most of the three decades before 9/11, Naftali writes, American officials failed to treat terrorism as a strategic threat.
"We treat terrorism and our counter-terrorism activities as our highest national security priority".
For hours, speakers assailed the British government for linking the group to terrorism, and for too often treating Muslims as terrorism suspects, and drummed at the theme of the need for Muslim rule.
But in Wolverhampton, Iftikhar Ahmed stressed that it was vital for the government to treat all terrorism and hate-related crime with equal seriousness from day one.
