Obama gets an F
A commander-in-chief’s first and foremost duty and responsibility is protecting American citizens. Obama gave a speech and announced that a terrorist’s ability to board an American airliner with explosives in his underwear was a “systemic failure.”
But as Toby Harnden, the U.S. editor of the British Daily Telegraph noted in his column , Obama is in charge of that system.
I agree with Harnden that Obama gets an F for national security.
Obama’s first year in office as president was marked by Obama’s frequent apologies for America, his bowing to foreign leaders and his treatment of captured foreign terrorists like they were U.S. citizens with constitutional rights.
These actions are perceived as weakness by al-Qadea and other enemies of America. Their reading of his weak leadership empowers them to commit bold and deadly attacks on us. Obama must think he is the community-organizer-in chief. He needs to toughen up and deal harshly with America’s enemies.
Obama must become a tougher commander-in-chief in 2010. America deserves and demands it.
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Re: “like they were U.S. citizens with constitutional rights.”
Actually, one of the glories of our Constitution is that non-citizens DO have constitutional rights — a remarkable number, in fact. This of course becomes a legal thicket when individual cases are argued, but the the Bill of Rights applies to everyone (even illegal immigrants). So a non-citizen prosecuted under the criminal code has the right to due process, a speedy and public trial, and other rights protected by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. A few rights are reserved to citizens, among them being the right to vote, the right to hold most federal jobs, and the right to run for political office.
One would not want it any other way. But we shouldn’t get too boastful: Many if not most other full-fledged democracies (Britain and Germany, for example) offer non-citizens the same or more rights.
This protection becomes particularly valuable for the hapless individual snatched as a terrorist who, it turns out after several months of being held incommunicado, is and was not a terrorist. Like that German chap a couple of years ago. Oops, sorry about that. Here, have a copy of the Constitution.
We prosecuted Nazi German and Imperial Japanese in military tribunals (and then executed them) and not in American criminal courts.
The terrorists are enemy combatants and not common criminals. They too should be tried in military tribunals.
Obama is weak on terrorism and weak on national security, and our enemies, the Islamc terrorists, know this.
That is not a rebuttal, merely an assertion of what we “should” do, not of what is constitutionally defensible or, indeed, honorable.
In any case, “we” did not prosecute them. They were tried and sentenced by an international court/tribunal of the United Nations, or, if you prefer, the Western Allies.
There was, admittedly, the case of would-be saboteurs, known as Ex parte Quirin, of eight German-Americans (one a U.S. citizen) who landed from a German submarine in 1942, were quickly rounded up before being able to commit any espionage, and within two months swiftly tried and sentenced in this country. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted a speedy trial, followed by equally speedy executions. He got his wish. A hand-tailored military commission held the trial entirely in secret, making up rules as it went along. All eight were found guilty and sentenced to death by electrocution. Two sentences were commuted; the remaining six were put to death Aug. 8, also in total secrecy. The Bush administration cited Ex parte Quirin as a legal basis for establishing military tribunals to try al-Qaeda terrorists.
Very well said, Parsifal. I think it’s essential that we offer suspected “terrorists” constitutional protections; it’s what gives us the moral high ground. Bush’s entire War on Terror strategy — which Paul seems to agree with 100%, probably because it was such a resounding success — effectively made it so that the terrorists “won”: we suspended our most cherished values of freedom and liberty and ensconced ourselves in two unwinnable foreign conflicts. This is exactly what Bin Laden, and other terrorists wanted; they wanted to win the propaganda war by showing how morally repugnant we are, how we are no better than the terrorists ourselves.
Of course we know that as a whole this is not true of a America; we have a robust, free society; our people are kind and good, and tend to be respectful of all cultures and ways of life. So the best way to fight terror, which thrives on propaganda, is to hold fast to our beautiful moral principles of freedom, justice, and liberty, because that’s what really distinguishes our free society from the pre-Enlightenment, authoritarian-theocratic morality of Al-Qaeda.
What is particularly enraging is the assumption by right-wingers that insistence upon the United States upholding its cherished system of justice even in the face of terrorist threats is somehow soft on terrorism and on the country’s defense. Besides being a vile and base canard, its logic borders on being un-American in the most exacting sense. It means you don’t think our court system is robust enough to do the job it has been doing for more than 220 years and should be abandoned in favor of ad hoc tribunals, Star Chambers, and other sorts of kangaroo courts. The true “patriot,” one would think, would stand up for one of the country’s most hallowed institutions, the independent judiciary. But no, the true “patriot,” by this perverted reasoning, hails the Orwellian named Patriot Act for restricting our liberties. Those who burn books, Heinrich Heine said, will end up burning people. Those who rejoice in denying rights to others will end up finding them denied to themselves.
If Bush’s war on terror were such a resounding success, why isn’t it over?? If Obama is so weak and Bush was so strong why did 9/11 happen during Bush’s time?
I can’t tell you how many people from abroad I met in recent years that passionatly hated us Americans very specifically because of Bush.
I give Obama an A for doing the job that few would want to even attempt. For continuing on with the good that he is doing even though his accomplishments will almost be overshadowed by the fact that no one person will be able to fix the disaster left by Bush.
Below is a link to a piece by Andrew C. McCarthy, who noted that the five terrorists are alien enemy combatants and are not entitled to the protection of our Billof Rights.
McCarthy is the former U.S. Attorney who prosecuted Sheik Omar Rahman in 1995.
I agree with McCarthy that Obama & Holder’s call to hold a civilian trial of the five alien enemy combatants in New York is politically motivated.
Read his piece:
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MWMwN2UyNzYwN2M1Y2JkNTdiODk1OWMyYmVmYTA2YmU
“The decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other top al-Qaeda terrorists to New York City for a civilian trial is one of the most irresponsible ever made by a presidential administration,” the man says. Really? In 220 years, one of the most irresponsible? More than, say, rounding up tens of thousands of bona fide American citizens, some of whose relatives (and fellow citizens) were soldiers fighting for their country, and putting them into concentration camps? More than rounding up thousands of Native Americans and driving them from one place to another because some other Americans not quite so native wanted the original place? More than supporting, rather than condemning, a Supreme Court decision that said a black man could never be an American citizen? More than – oh, I don’t know – invading a country that had not struck a first blow at you and thereby neglecting a war in a country from which a first blow had been struck?
That’s pretty irresponsible.
Right-wingnuts are always finding a Red under the bed, and – surprise! – it usually turns out to be an American liberal. Rhetorical overkill such as Herr McCarthy’s (the present one, not the senatorial right-wingnut in the 1950s) illuminates nothing but rightists’ desire to assert that they are the only ones capable of governing. Their attempts are laughable and doomed to failure – unless they get the kind of rights-restricted society they yearn for.
Military justice, the wise man said, is to justice as military music is to music. Which is to say, wide apart and scarcely recognizable as the real thing. It has gotten somewhat better in the last 40 years or so, perhaps as a result of the all-volunteer military. But if we are to have unilateral military tribunals, each one cobbled together to meet the needs of the moment, they should at least not also be constructed to automatically achieve the verdict desired at that moment, as was done in Ex parte Quirin, which was cited by the Bush administration as justification for doing what it damned well pleased. Those who constantly seek a military solution to every problem are a potential danger to civil society. Maybe not so potential.
If the basis of your objection to trials with the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to everyone is that such trials might allow defendants to present all the evidence they need to mount their case – which is what McCarthy says — then what you are saying is that you know the prosecution has done something that is itself indefensible and should not see the light of day. If you say that terrorists cannot be successfully tried as terrorists, then you are saying that the American judicial system is a flop from beginning to end. If you fear that groups supporting the terrorists will use material unearthed in a trial as anti-American propaganda, then you are saying you do not believe fully in an open society. In the last case, then your only recourse is to go live a closed society such as those the terrorists come from and prefer.