It’s worth asking if the Obama administration has been conducting a deliberate disinformation campaign on the issue of cooperating with a Spanish judge’s plan to investigate Bush administration officials for alleged war crimes. As has been discussed several times on this blog, it is stupefying that the President would even consider such a surrender of US sovereign policy making.
However, today the New York Times reports that the Obama administration is reconsidering its position on the use of military tribunals to prosecute Guantánamo detainees:
The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself.
Continuing the military commissions in any form would probably prompt sharp criticism from human rights groups as well as some of Mr. Obama’s political allies because the troubled system became an emblem of the effort to use Guantánamo to avoid the American legal system.
Officials who work on the Guantánamo issue say administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies.
Given the astroturfing nature of the sophisticated Obama message machine I wouldn’t be surprised if the Holder comments on cooperating with a Spanish Inquisition were nothing more than a decoy to divert Leftwing attention from this new policy reversal on military commissions at Gitmo. The Obama administration has demonstrated once again that every campaign promise it made had an expiration date (indeed, a very short expiration date on those foreign policy matters it demagogued and berated the Bush administration about). Here’s the money quote:
“The more they look at it,” said one official, “the more commissions don’t look as bad as they did on Jan. 20.”
Uh huh. The Left and moderates that bought this President’s rhetoric in 2008 should repudiate the administration’s flip flop if they desire to maintain any semblance of intellectual honesty and integrity. I’m not holding my breath for that.
Kim has more below.
