Lawyers will fight Barack’s war against terror
In an interview the other night Barack Obama, the candidate of change, suggested we return to the Clinton way of dealing with terrorists as a law enforcement issue, rather than accept that we’re really at war (Evening Standard link);
The comments from his camp came hot on the heels of a TV interview on Monday in which Mr Obama insisted the U.S. government could successfully crack down on terrorists ‘within the constraints of our Constitution’.
He backed a Supreme Court ruling last week that said detainees at Guantanamo Bay have a constitutional right to challenge their indefinite imprisonment in U.S. civilian courts – a ruling derided by Mr McCain as ‘one of the worst decisions in the history of this country’.
Obama suggested we should depend on law enforcement agencies to track down perpetrators (after they’ve committed a crime) and put them in prison to negate their future attacks.
[Obama] said that he believed that “we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution,” and noted that the United States had been able to arrest, try and jail the culprits in the first World Trade Center bombing.
[…]
“And, you know, let’s take the example of Guantánamo,” Obama said in the interview. “What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center — we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial.”
To his credit John McCain’s camp hit back with his big guns (International Herald Tribune link);
The McCain campaign asserted that Obama wanted to go back to treating terrorism as nothing more than a criminal matter, called him naïve and argued that the World Trade Center case was an example of how insufficient that was. “Once again we have seen that Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a Sept. 10 mindset,” Scheunemann said on the call.
Former CIA director James Woolsey, who is advising the McCain campaign, said Mr Obama, 46, had ‘an extremely dangerous and extremely naive approach toward terrorism … and toward dealing with prisoners captured overseas who have been engaged in terrorist attacks against the United States’.
Obama struck back by saying that there’s no proof that the Bush Doctrine has been successful. Well, other than the fact that we haven’t been attacked here or abroad. The proof that the Clinton method was a failure is the countless attacks on us and our assets abroad.
Everything that reflects negatively on Obama is a distraction;
Mr Obama responded sharply to yesterday’s comments from the McCain camp.
‘These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,’ he told reporters on board his campaign plane.
I guess all of those al Qeada lying in graves in Iraq are just a distraction, too. The best Obama camp could do is drag out Richard Clarke and John Kerry (Tahoe Daily Tribune);
The Obama campaign countered with its own conference call in which Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism official in Republican and Democratic administrations, argued the McCain campaign was emulating Rove.
“I’m a little disgusted by the attempts of some of my friends on the McCain campaign to use the same old, tired tactics … to drive a wedge between Americans for partisan advantage and to frankly frighten Americans,” Clarke said.
Kerry accused McCain of “defending a policy that is indefensible” by siding with Bush’s policies, particularly with respect to the Iraq war.
Obama said Republicans could be counted on to do “what they’ve done every election cycle, which is to use terrorism as club to make the American people afraid to win elections.” He said he didn’t think it would work this time.
More of that “fear-mongering, chickenhawk” sloganeering. Since there’s been no attack, there won’t be one ever, as I wrote earlier today – it’s terribly naive and it’s raw political pandering. If Obama becomes president, you can count on criticism of Obama over the imminent terrorist attack to be called a distraction from his social policies. That should make the victims feel better.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, John McCain/Sarah Palin, Politics, Terror War
Actually, al Qaeda isn’t really in Iraq, they’ve moved back to Afghanistan. The Afghani’s welcomed our presence, and wanted al Qaeda out. We had the chance to severely diminish their power while we were in Afghanistan, instead, we left to fight in Iraq. We left Afghanistan a ravaged country, ripe for al Qaeda’s picking – which is just what they’ve done. They returned to Afghanistan, and are thriving upon the mess we left. This isn’t a war on al Qaeda anymore. It hasn’t been one in a long time.
Jonn wrote: Someone should have told this guy that al Qaeda isn’t in Iraq;
“U.S. troops also captured six suspected insurgents, including a wanted man believed to have ties to local al-Qaida in Iraq leaders, the military said. Fifteen others were captured during operations targeting al-Qaida elsewhere in northern Iraq, according to the statement.”
Hey Emma, that will come as a great surprise to the troops that have been in Afghanistan this whole time. I can just see that conversation. “Damn Bill, did you know we haven’t been here since 2003?” “No kidding… I hope we don’t have to pay back that combat pay.”
“This isn’t a war on al Qaeda anymore. It hasn’t been one in a long time.”
Ya think Abu Musab al-Zarqawi got that memo?