No one wants to be the first candidate to invoke Sept. 11. As a campaign tactic, 9/11 chest-thumping has become both predictable and tacky. So this week, John McCain's campaign hit on a creative solution: Invoke Sept. 10.
Sept. 10? Yup. Barack Obama has "a Sept. 10 mind-set," McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann informed reporters Tuesday. The idea, as Scheunemann explained for those too thick to grasp the implied insult, is that a "naive" Obama just doesn't get it about terrorism.
Obama's offense? He praised the U.S. Supreme Court's June 12 decision that Guantanamo prisoners, detained for years without charge or trial, should be able to ask federal courts to rule on their continued detention.
McCain's surrogates were quick to seize the opportunity: Obama thinks that courts are the way to keep America safe! He "ignores that we are in a war against terrorism," opined former CIA Director R. James Woolsey. The McCain campaign even dredged up Rudy Giuliani, who lamented that Obama was "more concerned about the rights of terrorists ... than the rights that the American people have to safety and security."
Does Obama have a "Sept. 10" mind-set, whatever that is? No.
What Obama did was make a glaringly obvious point: If the Bush administration had prosecuted the captured terrorists in federal court instead of trying to put them through an error-riddled system of military commissions created on the fly, those terrorists would by now have probably been tried and convicted in fair proceedings that would have been accepted as such around the world.
Obama's point boiled down to common sense: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Our federal courts have been in business for more than 200 years. They've tried brutal Mafia bosses who controlled entire American cities, violent drug lords, Nazis, spies and the Oklahoma City bombers. U.S. courts have procedures for handling sensitive national security evidence, and they have already successfully tried Al Qaeda terrorists, including "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid and 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui. These men had their day in court, made idiots of themselves, and now they're locked away in a U.S. supermax prison.
Better still, they're now rightly dismissed by the rest of the world as megalomaniacal thugs -- not the kind of guys anyone would want to emulate. In contrast, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his buddies remain untried at Guantanamo, insisting proudly that they're "warriors" against the mighty United States -- and as Obama commented, that has "given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, 'Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.' "
