Much was already said about the Obama-Cheney dual speeches yesterday, so I’m providing my favorite analyses here. No sense trying to reinvent the wheel. So read, learn, and enjoy. And then go and educate your Bush/Cheney-hating liberal friends.
By the Editors (National Review Online)
President Obama wants you to know that nothing is ever his fault. He gave a speech on national-security matters Thursday the gist of which was: George W. Bush left me a mess, and I’m doing the best I can to clean it up. A more forthright theme would have been: Radical Islam has thrust the United States into a defensive war, and it’s now my duty to protect the nation — despite legal complications created by left-wing lawyers, many of whom are now working in my administration. […]
True to his September 10 philosophy, President Obama declared on Thursday that the civilian courts were “tough enough” to convict terrorists. That has never been the question. The problems are that the criminal-justice system cannot apprehend many terrorists (only 29 terrorists, mostly low-level, were prosecuted during the eight years of attacks leading up to 9/11), and that the few trials it manages become intelligence troves for the many thousands of terrorists remaining at large. Bush’s counterterrorism policies, particularly as supplemented by Congress in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the above-mentioned Military Commissions Act of 2006, afforded captured alien combatants an unprecedented degree of due process — far beyond that accorded at the Nuremberg Tribunals that President Obama is fond of citing as a testament to the “rule of law.” This due process includes a right of appeal to the civilian federal courts (which was expanded in 2008 by the Supreme Court’s wrongheaded Boumediene decision).
So it was strange to hear President Obama on Thursday, castigating the military-commission system that he has chosen to revive with only cosmetic changes. It is true, as the president points out, that the commission system has convicted only three terrorists of war crimes, but this is in no small part because the trials have been endlessly delayed by legal maneuvering from some of the very lawyers who now hold important positions in Obama’s administration. Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, for example, represented Osama bin Laden’s confidant Salim Hamdan in the Supreme Court case that derailed the commissions until Congress reversed the Court. Harold Koh, the attorney Obama has nominated to be State Department legal adviser, filed an amicus brief in behalf of the detainees in the same case. Attorney General Eric Holder’s old firm has represented at least 18 enemy combatants. Because of the thick web of relationships between terrorism suspects, Holder, and other like-minded lawyers he has recruited, the Justice Department has been forced to set up elaborate protocols for recusing prosecutors, including the attorney general himself, from various national-security cases.
And it was President Obama himself who delayed commissions for 21 terrorists back in January — some of whose trials were imminent. But instead of reinstating those proceedings, the president is delaying them still further, while his administration makes trivial procedural tweaks that will allow him to pretend his policies constitute a real departure from those of his predecessor.
The president insisted in his speech that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and enhanced interrogation techniques (which he characteristically referred to as “torture,” a term both legally inaccurate and morally obtuse) increased terrorist recruitment. In fact the leading driver of terrorist recruitment is successful terrorist attacks. That is what convinces the fence-sitters that radical Islam can win, and that Osama bin Laden is correct when he argues that the United States is a weak horse that will retreat when things get tough enough. The counterterrorism policies of the Bush administration prevented new terrorist attacks and assured the world’s bin Ladens that the United States was committed to their defeat. We hope that assurance still holds; if it does, it is only because President Obama, for all his unseemly disparagement of his predecessor, has picked up the tools George W. Bush left him and made them his own.
Obama’s Speech in Historical Context
PETER WEHNER - 05.21.2009 - 5:24 PM
I have read president Obama’s speech and was struck by several things. Among them is that for a man who insists on not wanting to re-litigate the last eight years, he has certainly done a splendid job of doing just that.
President Obama’s core complaint is the Bush Administration “went off course” and was guilty of undermining the rule of law. It failed to “use our values as a compass” and broke faith with the Constitution and basic human rights. And of course the main offense was waterboarding, which was used against exactly three known al Qaeda terrorists and was then discontinued. This is, in the world according to Obama, the main legacy and the overriding achievement of the Bush presidency.
But if Mr. Obama wants to tear into past presidents for violations of the Constitution and basic human rights during war time, perhaps he should start with those whom he must surely consider the worst violators of our Constitution and our values: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. […]
Professor [of Harvard, Jack] Goldsmith methodically examines eleven essential elements of the Bush approach to counter-terrorism and concludes, “at the end of the day, Obama practices will be much closer to late Bush practices than almost anyone expected in January 2009.”
To take just one example, on the matter of habeas corpus, Goldsmith writes this:
During the campaign, former professor Obama spoke eloquently about the importance ofhabeas corpus review of executive detentions of enemy soldiers. Habeas corpus is “the foundation of Anglo-American law” and “the essence of who we are,” he said. But his administration has applied this principle in the same narrow fashion as the late Bush administration. It has argued that Guantanamo detainees can challenge the “fact, duration, or location” of confinement on habeas review, but not their “conditions of confinement.” It has maintained that “the Geneva Conventions are not judicially enforceable by private individuals” in habeas proceedings. And it has made clear its belief that the limited habeas rights it recognizes for the two hundred or so detainees on Guantanamo Bay do not extend to the 600 or so detainees in Bagram Air Base. This latter position might prove more controversial for President Obama than for President Bush. The new president’s enlarged military commitment in Afghanistan and Pakistan, combined with the forthcoming closure of Guantanamo, means that the number of suspects detained in Bagram — without charge or trial and without access to lawyers or habeasrights — is likely to increase, perhaps dramatically.
How exactly does President Obama square his policy of not extending even limitedhabeas rights to detainees in Bagram Air Base with, say, his speech today? […]
Still politicizing our security
By David Limbaugh
May 22, 2009
Democratic strategist Bob Shrum says the charge that Democrats are playing politics with national security is "a smear." Democratic strategist Bob Beckel said: "I've never heard a more slanderous, disgraceful performance by a former vice president or president than I just listened to. The idea that Dick Cheney would suggest that the Obama administration was putting, for political purposes, at risk the security of the United States of America and lives of American people is outrageous."
No, Bob(s), what's outrageous is that the charges ring true. Why else, besides politics, would Obama and other Democrats have lambasted and discredited the Bush administration for years over its WOT policies and then adopt many of those very same policies, from extraordinary rendition to the NSA warrantless surveillance program to recognizing that the laws of war permit the U.S. to capture enemy combatants and detain them without trial until the conclusion of hostilities to the use of cosmetically modified military commissions, which Obama had earlier called a "legal black hole"?
If rank partisanship hasn't been at play here, how does one reconcile the Democrats' demagoguery against Bush to close Gitmo come hell or high water with congressional Democrats' present refusal to fund Gitmo's closure until Obama presents a plan concerning placement of the prisoners?
Apart from recognizing it as a partisan witch hunt, how do you explain why the Obama-Holder Justice Department condemned enhanced interrogation techniques as torture, to the point that it considered prosecuting Bush officials and its Justice Department lawyers for authorizing and recommending them, yet endorsed the Bush position on torture just weeks ago, in Demjanjuk v. Holder? How do you explain the approval of these very techniques by the Democratic leadership, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when briefed by the CIA and the Bush administration?
And the money question: If, indeed, Barack Obama is so convinced that enhanced interrogation methods violate our values and the rule of law, how do you rationally explain his reservation of the authority to reinstitute the practice?
Democratic strategists are free to dramatize their manufactured indignation over the charge of subordinating our national security for political gain, but their chickens are coming home to roost. Their inconsistent, untenable, reckless positions have been exposed, and they've tied themselves in knots.
Jed Babbin
05/22/2009
President Obama’s Thursday speech was simply breathtaking. It was an hubristic exhibition, another chapter in his effort to permanently label the Republicans the “Party of George W. Bush.”
Standing in the hall of the National Archives, Obama began by claiming the Constitution as his ancestor. His sophistry soared, claiming that it was our values that had defeated our enemies throughout history, their soldiers surrendering to ours because they knew we would treat them better than their own governments. That statement he would not dare repeat on the hallowed grounds of Gettysburg, Normandy, or Iwo Jima, in Baghdad or the mountains of Afghanistan. Then saying he didn’t want to relitigate the past, Mr. Obama presented the longest and most comprehensive condemnation of the Bush administration ever. […]
President Obama is an ideological absolutist. Vice President Cheney’s ideology is tempered by experience. There will, I hope, be more of these Obama vs. Cheney matchups. Score this round Cheney 1, Hubris 0.
Selling Insecurity
Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, May 22, 2009
Obama was more forthright – if not more convincing – in his assessment of Guantanamo’s impact on the larger war on terror. “The record is clear,” the president said, “rather than keep us safer, the prison atGuantanamo has weakened American national security.”
Even from Obama’s own remarks, though, this was anything but clear. The president noted, for instance, that Guantanamo is home to terrorists who remain a threat to the United States, including “people who have received extensive explosives training at al-Qaeda training camps, commanded Taliban troops in battle, expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.”
That echoes earlier findings by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point that 73 percent of Gitmo detainees are a “demonstrated threat” to Americans, while 95 percent were at the least a “potential threat.” Since Guantanamo is the reason that these detainees have not been able to carry out additional terrorist attacks, it defies common sense to claim that the prison has “weakened” national security.
Beyond shoddy logic, Obama’s speech also had serious practical flaws. Obama pointed out that his “review team” has approved 50 detainees to be transferred from Guantanamo. What he could not say is where these detainees would be transferred, alluding vaguely to “discussions with a number of other countries.”
That was no coincidence. European countries have been unwilling to take in detainees, even if it means an expedited end to the detention center they have denounced as an affront to human rights. Britain andFrance, for example, have agreed to accept just one prisoner each. As Cheney observed in his AEI speech, Obama may have won “applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo,” but “the United States has had little luck getting other countries to take hardened terrorists. So what happens then?”
What indeed. Sending the detainees back to their countries of origin is no solution. Of the 240 prisoners who remain at Guantanamo, nearly 100 are from Yemen, whose policy of dealing with detainees through “rehabilitation” programs, paired with its popularity as a destination for ex-Guantánamo inmates eager to rejoin terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, makes it a singularly poor choice to accept the detainees. It’s no wonder that the most effective point made by Cheney yesterday concerned the difficulty of the choices facing the government as it works to prevent another terrorist attack on American soil.
While the president’s rhetoric often suggests otherwise, that reality may be dawning on the Obama administration. In this connection, perhaps the best that can be said of the president’s address is that his actions don’t match his words. As Harvard law professor and former Bush official Jack Goldsmith [also cited in the Wehner article above] observed in the New Republic this week, on a host of national security issues – from military detention, military commissions, and targeted killings, to habeas corpus rights, rendition and surveillance programs – the Obama administration’s policies are largely indistinguishable from the policies in the later years of the Bush administration. “The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging,” Goldsmith wrote.
The Guantanamo debate is a case in point. Yesterday’s dueling speeches were a clash of styles more than substance. True, Obama continues to attack the Bush administration’s record on national security, often unfairly. But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, President Obama has paid his predecessors the ultimate compliment.
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