Sunday, April 18, 2010
Regardless of the rhetorical attacks Republicans have lobbed at him for being soft on terrorism, President Barack Obama is continuing much of his predecessor’s policies and strategies for the war on terror, argues Eli Lake at Reason.com.
Sure, Obama allowed the FBI to read the Christmas-Day airline bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, his constitutional rights. And his attorney general, Eric Holder, said he wanted to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in a New York criminal courtroom. But there are many decisions by Obama that are in line with the “9/14 presidency”—named after the legislative powers Congress granted to President George W. Bush just three days following the September 11 attacks.
“When it comes to the legal framework for confronting terrorism, President Obama is acting in no meaningful sense any different than President Bush after 2006, when the Supreme Court overturned the view that the president’s war time powers were effectively unlimited,” writes Lake. “As the Obama administration itself is quick to point out, the Bush administration also tried terrorists apprehended on U.S. soil in criminal courts, most notably “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui and shoe bomber Richard Reid. More important, President Obama has embraced and at times defended the same expansive view of a global war against Al Qaeda as President Bush.”
The Obama administration has also embraced the plan to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely without charge, “try them via military tribunal, keep them imprisoned even if they are acquitted, and kill them in foreign countries with which America is not formally at war (including Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan).”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
The 9/14 Presidency (by Eli Lake, Reason.com)
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