PrintSurprise! Obama may revive Military Tribunals at Gitmo
There are times when politicians acknowledge reality and switch their positions on the issues. There are times that politicians, when exposed to new information on an issue, sincerely change their minds. There are also times that a politician will "trim their sails" and simply blow with the political winds.
And then there are liars like President Obama.
News from the New York Times that the president will adopt another Bush era program in the War on Terror and revive the Military Tribunals he so bitterly denounced during the campaign. Talk of trying the terrorists in America courts will disappear - for exactly the same reasons that President Bush decided to set up the tribunals in the first place as this piece by William Glaberson makes crystal clear:
Officials who work on the Guantánamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies.
Obama administration officials - and Mr. Obama himself - have said in the past that they were not ruling out prosecutions in the military commission system. But senior officials have emphasized that they prefer to prosecute terrorism suspects in existing American courts. When President Obama suspended Guantánamo cases after his inauguration on Jan. 20, many participants said the military commission system appeared dead.
To highlight the cynicism employed by the Administration, we have this quote from an unamed "official:"
"The more they look at it," said one official, "the more commissions don't look as bad as they did on Jan. 20."
Nor do most other Bush era programs to fight terror and protect the homeland. The president doesn't want a terrorist attack to occur on American soil anymore than Bush did nor does he want the terrorists in American courts where their lawyers will tie up the legal system with one gambit after another. There is also the fact that most of the testimony against the terrorists was given in top secret interrogations and the problem of revealing those sources in an American court means the tipsters would be left helpless against the terrorists.
The more the administration examines the previous administration's efforts to combat terrorism, the more they are seeking to adopt their methods. The rank dishonesty of a president who spent an entire campaign lambasting his predecessor for these policies and then having the gall to take office proclaiming that "the rule of law" had been restored is apparent in every action they take.
Somewhere, Bush is smiling and feeling a great deal of satisfaction.
