Free Republic

The Obama administration has shelved the planned prosecution of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged coordinator of the Oct. 2000 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, according to a court filing. The decision at least temporarily scuttles what was supposed to be the signature trial of a major al-Qaeda figure under a reformed system of military commissions. And it comes practically on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the attack, which killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens when a boat packed with explosives ripped a hole in the side of the warship in the port of Aden.

President Barack Obama, speaking last night at the White House’s iftar dinner marking Ramadan, defended plans to build a mosque and Islamic community center near Ground Zero. The nation’s commitment to religious freedom he said, “must be unshakable.” “I understand the emotions that this issue engenders. Ground Zero is, indeed, hallowed ground,” he said. As WSJ reporters Devlin Barrett and Jonathan Weisman noted, the project “has generated opposition from a host of prominent Republicans, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Resistance to other mosque-building plans has sprouted around the country, but the symbolism...

By charging headlong into the ferocious controversy over the plan to build a mosque near Ground Zero, President Barack Obama may have further damaged Democratic Party prospects in the upcoming mid-term elections. For while his return to the soaring rhetoric that won him the White House in the first place will be popular with hard-core liberal supporters, it is unlikely to capture the hearts of middle-America this year. In 2008 Mr Obama was a largely unknown quantity running on the strength of untried ideas and a ringing call for moral superiority. But now all of that has changed. According to...