Obama – The September 10th Candidate

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Yesterday the messiah uttered these brilliant words:

And, you know, let’s take the example of Guantanamo. 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. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.

And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, ‘Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.

Whoa…where to start?

First, this kind of mindset is what helped cause 9/11 in the first place. al-Qaeda sat and watched as we fooled around with arresting a few people and then washed our hands of the whole terrorism threat until the next attack occurred. Khobar happened and what did we do? Try to treat it as a law enforcement issue. The African embassies? Same thing….as well as the Cole. Oh sure, Clinton would send a few missiles into Afghanistan or bomb a aspirin factory to try to at least “look” like he was doing something about the threat (while alleging Saddam had ties to the factory that AQ used to produce chemical weapons to boot….GASP! Saddam had ties to AQ? No way!) but in the end Osama and pals viewed us as weak. And with that kind of leadership we were.

They didn’t count on a strong leader to change the way this country does business like George W. Bush. Thank god.

Oh, and lets not forget that the criminal trial led to the disclosure through discovery that we were listening to Osama. We all know happened after that.

And now our Supreme Court says the same enemy must have access to our courts and the same kind of discovery. Mind boggling stupidity and Obama loves it.

Secondly we have to look at this part of Obama’s statement:

we were able to arrest those responsible

Wrongo boyo! Jim Geraghty sets him straight and wouldn’t you know it….it involved Iraq once again:

No, not all of them. Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi native, was twice interrogated by the FBI and then allowed to walk away a free man. He fled the United States in the days after that attack and returned, with the assistance of officials at the Iraqi embassy in Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad. He lived openly in Baghdad with his father and a neighbor interviewed in 1994 by an ABC News/Newsweek investigative team told the reporters that he was working for the Iraqi regime.

There are conflicting reports about how Saddam Hussein treated Yasin after these reports were made public, with some documentation suggesting the Iraqis were holding him under some form of house arrest and other documents that seem to indicate he was being actively harbored — given housing and living allowances — by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

What is not in dispute, however, is that Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services helped Yasin return to Iraq mere days after he helped orchestrate the 1993 World Trade Center attack. According to the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report on Prewar Intelligence (signed by all of the panel’s Democrats): “Abdul Rahman Yasin, a fugitive from the attack, is of Iraqi descent, and in 1993, he fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance.”

Beyond the fact that Obama seems to have been unaware of Yasin’s flight and the role Saddam Hussein’s regime played in it is his odd embrace of law enforcement as the proper way to treat terrorists. It’s as if he wasn’t paying attention in the 1990s.

Oh, he was paying attention. From the pews of the Trinity church as the pastor told him that these attacks were all our fault anyways.

Now this part of his statement is downright funny:

we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, ‘Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.

Whoakay…..

I think Allah tackles this well:

Is he so naive as to seriously believe wacko jihadis draw some huge distinction between the legitimacy of Gitmo and the legitimacy of district court trials? Exit quotation from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

“I cannot accept any attorney who is not governed by sharia [Islamic] law. I will represent myself. I will not be represented by anybody even if he is a Muslim, because he will be sworn to your American Constitution. I consider all the U.S. Constitution and laws evil. They are allowing for same-sexual marriages and many things that are very bad … Do you understand what I said?”

This is so obviously not about preventing terrorist attacks for Obama. This is about making himself and this country look good to those who hate us. Our nations security be damned.

McCain smelled blood with this ignorant comment from Obama and wasted no time:

“Barack Obama’s belief that we should treat terrorists as nothing more than common criminals demonstrates a stunning and alarming misunderstanding of the threat we face from radical Islamic extremism. Obama holds up the prosecution of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 as a model for his administration, when in fact this failed approach of treating terrorism simply as a matter of law enforcement rather than a clear and present danger to the United States contributed to the tragedy of September 11th. This is change that will take us back to the failed policies of the past and every American should find this mindset troubling.”

Right on target.

How does Obama respond? By trying to take some of it back:

My quote, the point I was making and I’ve made before, is without giving full blown rights to those who are being held, we can set up a system of due process, and when I said that the administration didn’t even try to do that, what I have consistently said is that rather than figure out how do we effectively hold these folks, detain them, provide them with some due process, try them, lock them up, the administration decided to take a bunch of short cuts.”…

“We don’t have to treat them in the same way that we would treat a criminal suspect in the U.S., but we should abide by the Geneva conventions. We should at least follow through on the same principals we followed though when dealing with Nazis during Nuremburg, that is not only the right thing to do but it also actually will strengthen our ability over the long term to fight terrorism.”

Asked by Richard Wolffe of Newsweek what he would suggest be done with detainees, Obama said “we can lock them up in military facilities on U.S. soil in the same way that we locked them up in Gitmo. The reason we set up Gitmo is because the administration wanted to set up a black hole where there was no accountability whatsoever…

“It does not have to be before a U.S. district court,”
Obama said, “but if we provided some modicum of due process, we can have confidence that we’ve got the right people, that we’re not wasting time on the wrong people. We can send a message to the world that we continue to abide by the standards of rule of law, and we can actually be more effective in our pursuit of terrorism.”

Um, it was Congress that set up the trial process, the same Congress he is currently in. Not the Administration. Also, the Supreme Court just ruled it DOES have to be before a U.S. district court…..did he not get the memo?

Be that it may, would you call this a flip? Or a flop?

I call it ignorance. And dangerous ignorance at that.

More here.

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Date

07/19/2007

Bill Title
Sense of the Senate on Guantanamo Bay
Detainees S Amdt 2351

Vote by Obama
NV

Result
Amendment Adopted –
Senate (94 – 3)

Vote to pass an amendment that expresses the sense of the Senate that the detainees at Guantanamo Bay should not be released into American society or transferred into detention facilities on American soil.

Official Title of Legislation:

S Amdt 2351 to S Amdt 2327 to HR 2669: To express the sense of the Senate on the detainees of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Way to go Obama

The first detainee to avail himself of the 5-4 SCOTUS decision will appear before a military judge on Wed.

Against that backdrop [the Boudemaine decision], navy Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, Khadr’s military-appointed defence lawyer, will use Wednesday’s hearing to argue that the entire case against the Toronto-born accused terrorist should be thrown out on grounds U.S. authorities have never told him of his rights.

John F’n Kerry said today that Osama, if captured, deserves his day in court.

Unreal.

ever notice how when obama is called on his vague and confused answers they get more vague and confused? then he wonders why everyone is lokking at him like he is crazy because he makes even less sense than usual. hate to sound like i want a “lynching”, but i think some of the gitmo guys should have had accidents in the field or something. they are scarey, scarey people who will stopa tnothing to destroy this country and obama wants to help them.

This is the best the Democarats could do. A man that will bring us back to a 9/10 mentality and go after them like they are a common criminal. I am sure tha FDR, JFK Scoop Jackson and many other Democrats are rolling in their graves right now.

Yet more as BHO rattles on, from The NYT’s political blog, The Caucus:

First the typical pol response to anything… let’s get the BDS victims cheering again with the same ol, same ol…

“These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could’ve pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to reporters aboard his campaign plane. “In part because of their failed strategies, we’ve got bin Laden still sending out audio tapes, so I don’t think they have much standing to suggest that they’ve learned a lot of lessons from 9/11.”

If memory serves me right, Congress played a HUGE role in that engineered “distraction” with the AUMF. Oh yes… BHO couldnt’ know that. He wasn’t there! He was against it, before he could actually be held accountable one way or another.

“What they are trying to do is what they’ve done every election cycle, which is to use terrorism as a club to make the American people afraid – to win elections,” he said.

Ah yes, the ol’ “fear” tactic they accuse the GOP of, while simultaneously using the “fear” tactic *against* the GOP. Huh?

“The simple point that I was making, which I will continue to make throughout this campaign, is that we can abide by due process and abide by basic concepts of rule of law and still crack down on terrorists,” Mr. Obama said. “None of the folks that were speaking for McCain today have given us one bit of information that would suggest that as a consequence of the court’s ruling, terrorists will be able to attack America more effectively.”

All in all, this last statement is boldly – and prematurely – spoken since we have yet to encounter what classified evidence may be demanded, what witnesses may be called, etal. After all, SCOTUS nipped a process created by Congress (evidently sans Obama…) in the bud, before it could ever be used.

Will His Messiahship change his tune when lawyers in a court demand classified info, or suggest that the case be thrown out when it’s not provided? How about when they attempt to haul an undercover informer into court for the accused to confront?

That BHO can not see the “consequences” of the court ruling, right along with the “blind” majority justices, suggests we all might be headed up sheeeeeet’s creek, paddle’less.

Obama calls Iraq part of a “failed strategy?”

Failed how? No attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11 and no recent terror attacks on U.S. interests or persons anywhere in the world.

How is that a failure? What would Obama do better? He never says.

I like the part of Jake Tapper’s question that precedes Obama’s answer:

there has not been a terrorist attack within the U.S. since 9/11. And they say the reason that is, is because of the domestic programs, many of which you opposed, the NSA surveillance program, Guantanamo Bay, and other programs. How do you know that they’re wrong? It’s not possible that they’re right?

How many of these terror plots have been foiled directly due to the Bush “failed strategy”?

Had we not been taking aggressive measures to PREVENT another terrorist attack we might have lost those passenger jets over the Atlantic from Britain a couple of years ago with thousands dead and their bodies never recovered. I could go on and cite many, MANY other examples.

How is that the Obamatons can say such crap with a straight face?

Barack Hussein Obama, Osama Bin Laden (I know it’s probably hard to tell the two apart) was behind the 93′ WTC attack as well. Where is he?

“…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.”

And we all know how effective THAT was in preventing any future attack.

Totally off topic, but I’m following the rules for a meme that hit me and that I’m now bouncing to you.

Yes, Aye Chi, Ossama Bin Laden deserves his day in court, not because of what he is, but because of what we are:

A civilized democratic country, founded on, and still adherent to, the rule of law.

That is a very “noble” statement, Dave Noble. One that, in theory I can agree on. However will you still feel that way if OBL, guilty beyond all doubt, goes free for legal technicalities?

I really do want to know what jurisdiction that Osam bin Laden falls under.???? He is not a US citizen and if caught would be a unlawful combatant which would fall under military jurisdiction. So where should we try him at???? Military tribunals were good for all other wars we have ever been, what changes this one???? Oh I forgot, Osoma is a criminal, not an enemy. He is just like the local drug dealer or gang member. What a fool I was.

Osama bin Laden should not be tried under US Law, he is not a US citizen, and will not be caught on US soil. Simply there is no way any terrorists should be tried in any US court.

The Supreme Court just gave everyone in the World a US Citizenship.

Honestly Mata, I don’t think Dave would care.

In my estimation, he would herald it as another “the system worked” moment.

The only law applicable to the battlefield is the Law of Land Warfare and the Geneva Conventions.

Those laws make it rather clear what should happen to OBL if he is ever captured.

However, I happen to believe that his bones are a mouldering in a cave somewhere and we won’t ever have to cross that bridge.

Stix, if OBL is ever brought onto US soil for trial he will, ironically enough, go to New York City which is where he was indicted for the embassy bombings.

Somehow I don’t see him finding a judge who wouldn’t need to recuse him/herself from the case and can you imagine what jury selection would be like?

He’s already been indicted (in absentia) by a grand jury in US District Court, Stix. I would say, in theory, if he were captured elsewhere, we could request extradition… provided we have an extradition agreement with the capturing country.

So evidently he’s already set up to be tried in US District Courts. I don’t know if that’s the only indictment he has.

UPDATE: Again Aye Chi and I are furiously typing simultaneously… da in sync minds continue.

I am just wondering who will be called to testify and what classified evidence would be permitted in court. Maybe we can tell them how we are going after them like we did with OBL’s satellite phone.