Obama's KSM Flip-Flop: A Win for Bush

When George W. Bush was president, then candidate Barack Hussein Obama railed against indefinite detention and military tribunals.  After the election, President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder pledged to try Khalid Sheik Mohamed (“KSM”) in federal court in New York.  The great and the good decried Guantanamo Bay.  The nightly news and all of the cognoscenti criticized the descent of America into a lawless land.  What a difference two years makes.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court has denied certification for three habeas petitioners who have been held for nine years without trial.  Much, if not all of that time, spent at Guantanamo Bay.  Also, Attorney General Holder announced that KSM would be tried before a military tribunal.  At NRO, Andrew McCarthy took a victory lap.

The president made clear today that he’s running for president.  Obama is presiding over Iraq and Afghanistan and has launched a new intervention in Libya.  He cannot run as a dewy-eyed peacemaker in 2012.  America’s continued fight in those places, and others, is going to rack up some very unattractive prisoners and to try them in American courts is both unprecedented and foolish.  Al Qaeda and jihadists don’t need publicity.  Civilian courts are ill-suited to this sort of trial and Obama is doing the right thing for the country by this move.  He benefits and American benefits.  Only the puerile left, whose creature he claimed to be, suffers.

When ACT UP, Code Pink and the rest fail to rise up against Obama their very nature will be exposed before the world.  No future Republican president need do anything to explain the nature of his opposition but point to the Obama campaign of 2008 and its aftermath.  Professional doves need never be taken seriously again.  Now President Obama should apologize to George W. Bush whose very policy he has adopted as his own, and who he maligned so unfairly to obtain his current position as a War President and a detainer of foreign enemies.

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