With the ruling, yesterday, from Atty General Eric Holder that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will be tried in New York City, in a civilian court, [1] Americans should begin to notice a pattern from the Obama administration of running in exactly the opposite direction from Mainstream America. We started Bailout after bailout, with numbers that made the Bush Administrations dallience with government owned everything pale by comparison. Then, with Cap and Trade Tax. Then, moving right along, we dove into the government takeover of health care. Add to that the insisted -upon closing of GITMO. Now, this business with KSM, which is the latest in a series of horrifically bad moves by this administration…. decisions that un directly afoul of the views of mainstream America.
Of course there’s a motive, here, which NRO’s Andy McCarthy explains [2]:
[3]
Andy Mccarthy
This summer, I theorized [4] that Attorney General Eric Holder — and his boss — had a hidden agenda in ordering a re-investigation of the CIA for six-year-old alleged interrogation excesses that had already been scrutinized by non-partisan DOJ prosecutors who had found no basis for prosecution. The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies (i.e., the policies that kept us safe from more domestic terror attacks), coupled with the Holder Justice Department’s obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the “reckoning” that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. It would be too politically explosive for Obama/Holder to do the dirty work of charging Bush administration officials; but as new revelations from investigations and declassifications are churned out, Leftist lawyers use them to urge European and international tribunals to bring “torture” and “war crimes” indictments. Thus, administration cooperation gives Obama’s base the reckoning it demands but Obama gets to deny responsibility for any actual prosecutions.
Today’s announcement that KSM and other top al-Qaeda terrorists will be transferred to Manhattan federal court for civilian trials neatly fits this hidden agenda. Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials. They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses — intelligence sources — must expose themselves and their secrets.
Exactly correct, on all counts.
So, not only does it run off all of the opinions and deeply held beliefs of the American mainstream, this ruling by Holder…. (with the open support of the President, given Obama’s reaction in Japan, yesterday) also places in serious jeopardy our ability to continue gathering intelligence for the purpose of keeping us safe. All this risk, just so that Obama can mollify the far left, who is to this day still looking for something / anything that can be hung on President Bush.
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey says, as quoted in The American Spectator, [5] that this action on the part of the Obama administration pushes us back to a pre-9/11 mentality. He is quite correct, of course that that mentality is what drives this action. It’s as I said the other day, in response to the Ft Hood shooting, and the Administrations response to it… This administration desperately needs political cover. To obtain the political cover, they need to ignore the fact that we are at war with radical Islam. The administration further believes, wrongly, that everything can be handled by our criminal justice system. They are wrong on both counts.
I asked, in my Ft Hood article yesterday [6], what policy changes will occur as a result of the Fort Hood attacks. Would President Obama start taking Islamic terrorism or seriously now than as he did as Candidate Obama? This action by the administration yesterday would appear to answer the question with a resounding “no”.
I suggest that all Americans should be seriously afraid that the damage the administration is doing to this country… on all fronts… including the economic damage and the damage in our security and international standing, is irreparable. Someone cannot possibly run afoul of mainstream America so consistently , without having a plan to do so. As such, I must consider the possibility that the damage being inflicted on us by our own administration is intentional.