Guantanamo Laureate

National Review ^ | 10/28/2009 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Servant of the Cross]

Barack Obama threw many stones at George W. Bush, and now lives in a glass house.

Over the last decade Barack Obama — in campaign mode for various state and federal offices — repeatedly denounced the Bush-era security protocols as either unlawful or of little utility. Indeed, few political figures made the case so unremittingly that the United States had gone rogue in its zealotry to fight terror.

To perpetual candidate Obama, there were no tragic choices, no hazy areas of human frailty, no recognition that well-intentioned public servants were doing their best under trying circumstances to keep Americans safe, and to do so as humanely as possible. Instead, the so-called “war on terror” became an easy target for a demagogue worried more about scoring political points than about understanding the plight of his country at war.

Rendition? Obama once called that “shipping away prisoners in the dead of night.”

Military tribunals? They were nothing more than a “flawed military commission system.”

Preventive detention of terrorists? To Obama that was “detaining thousands without charge or trial.”

How about the surge of troops into Iraq? “Not working.”

And the Patriot Act? “Shoddy and dangerous.”

But nothing so roused candidate Obama’s scorn as the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. To him, it was a “sad chapter in American history”; “a legal black hole”; “a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus”; etc. On the stump he serially caricatured it before cheering audiences as some sort of Soviet-style gulag. Not once but in succession he vowed to close it down by January 2010, to mark a symbolic year’s period of change in the era of Obama.

--SNIP--

[Servant of the Cross]

VDH skewers the not-ready-for-prime time pres__ent.

[The_Victor]

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