Meandering toward disaster: the perils of making a left-wing ideologue commander-in-chief

National Review, Sept 1, 2008 by Andrew C. McCarthy

ON the War on Terror, as with most issues, it can be difficult to understand Barack Obama's thinking if you listen only to his finely wrought speeches. But if you take the time to watch as Obama meanders toward a position, understanding him is easy.

Case in point: the Supreme Court's abysmal Boumediene decision in June, extending the constitutional right of habeas corpus (the right to have one's detention reviewed by a court) to alien enemy combatants held by the military at Guantanamo Bay. Obama was heartened by the ruling. As is his wont upon straying from the TelePrompTer, he dug himself a hole, this time in the form of an impromptu paean to pre-9/11 days, when terrorism was managed as though it were a garden-variety law-enforcement matter. "What we know," he proclaimed on June 16, "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. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated."

What we actually know is that everything Obama said was wrong.

We were not able to arrest all of those responsible even for the 1993 WTC bombing--one of the plotters escaped and was harbored for a decade by Saddam Hussein's Iraq (you remember, the place where Obama says there were no terrorists until the U.S. invasion). Of the two dozen terrorists indicted for al-Qaeda's 1998 American-embassy bombings, which killed more than 200 people, only five have been prosecuted. That number does not include Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a Qaeda founder who was not tried for his role in the attacks because he exploited the relatively weak security of the civilian criminal-justice system to attempt an escape during a meeting with his lawyers, maiming a prison guard in the process; he was consequently sentenced to 32 years in prison for attempted murder. The Clinton administration did not even bother to file indictments for the attacks on Khobar Towers (19 U.S. airmen killed) and the USS Cole (17 U.S. sailors killed). And the fugitive Osama bin Laden was not exactly incapacitated by his grand-jury indictment in June 1998--he orchestrated the embassy bombings, the Cole bombing, and 9/11 from Afghanistan, where the FBI has not had much success executing arrest warrants.

The McCain camp pounced on Obama's gaffe, sending him into his familiar backpedal dance. As usual, Obama argued that the real problem was that Republican fear-mongers and benighted commentators were failing to grasp the elegant nuance of his thinking. (After all, he has taught constitutional law in an elite law school!) Obama said he had simply praised the pre-9/11 enforcement strategy and gone on to fault Bush for abandoning it. Why on earth would anyone think he was endorsing what he had praised? Obama insisted he had merely meant "that we can abide by due process and abide by basic concepts of rule of law and still crack down on terrorists." Meaning ... what? Civilian trials for everyone? Obama wouldn't say, but he wanted at least habeas corpus for everyone: "The question is whether or not, as the Supreme Court said, people who are being held have a chance to at least suggest that 'Hey, you've got the wrong guy,' or 'I shouldn't be here.' It's not a question about whether or not they're free." Got that?

Richard Clarke thought he had it. The former Clinton counterterrorism czar and Obama adviser told ABC News that even Osama bin Laden should have the habeas corpus "right to go to federal court and ask the government to release him." Clarke's assessment was not only in sync with Obama's Delphic circumlocutions but was also an entirely accurate statement of what Boumediene holds. And that is precisely the problem: Obama's script calls for him to favor the Supreme Court's ruling, which is wildly popular with the Left, but to do so only by dilating on "due process" and "the rule of law"-lest the fog lift and voters grasp that Obama's idea of "cracking down on terrorists" includes conferring American civil rights upon Osama bin Laden.

That is why, in a press gaggle on June 18, Obama declined to "speculate" on how, if president, he would handle bin Laden, were al-Qaeda's emir to be captured. Gone, though, was the candidate's enthusiasm for trials in the criminal-justice system, which had been in evidence just two days before. The important things, Obama now stressed, were that bin Laden not be turned into a "martyr," and that he be handled "in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he's engaged in." Given that bin Laden himself has both declared war on the United States and claimed credit for sundry mass-murder attacks, one wonders what exactly it is that Obama thinks "the entire world" is in the dark about.

Having dealt with that question, Obama floated another trial balloon: an international tribunal on the Nuremberg model. "One of the hallmarks, one of the high-water points, I think, of U.S. foreign policy," said he, "was the Nuremberg trials. Because the world had not seen before victors behave in ways that advanced a set of universal principles. And that set a tone for post-war reconstruction and creation of an international order that I think was extraordinarily important." But what were these universal principles? At Nuremberg, there was no appellate process, no habeas corpus, and no access to American civilian courts to say, "Hey, you've got the wrong guy." For several of the defendants, the tribunals were followed in short order by a date with the business end of a noose.