RUSH: A quick audio sound bite here, Jan Crawford Greenburg — is she Greenberg anymore? Oh, it just says Jan Crawford, CBS, the legal correspondent. This morning on the Early Show with Harry Smith, this is about the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial and the Obama administration cutting Holder off at the knees, ‘You know what, we think we’re going to do this in a military tribunal,’ and Harry Smith says, ‘Was this inevitable?’
CRAWFORD: Keep in mind, this was the single biggest break from the Bush administration on these war on terror policies. The attorney Eric Holder in an appearance on Capitol Hill told senators, failure was not an option, these cases must be won; this was the course they were going to pursue. So now to see them retreat on this is a failure, it is a failure to get through a major policy shift, the left, the civil rights organizations, civil liberties organizations, are going to be absolutely incandescent.
RUSH: So my friend Andy McCarthy at National Review Online says, whoa, wrong take here. ‘Hold the Champagne on Military Commissions — It’s a Head Fake.’ He cites a Washington Post article about all this. ‘President Obama is not caving on military commissions. He has already caved on them: He failed (thankfully) to abolish them, Congress enacted legislation endorsing them again in 2009, and the administration has already directed a commission trial for the Cole bombers. The real agenda here is to close Gitmo. That’s the ball to keep your eye on. The Post is trying to soften the opposition to shuttering the detention camp by portraying beleaguered, reasonable Obama as making a great compromise that will exasperate the Left. The idea is to strengthen Sen. Lindsey Graham’s hand in seeking reciprocal compromise from our side.
‘This, however, is a matter of national security, not horse-trading over a highway bill. You don’t agree to do a stupid thing that endangers the country just because your opposition has magnanimously come off its insistence that you do two stupid things that endanger the country. If a deal to grant military commissions in exchange for closing Gitmo happens, it is a major win for the Obama Left and an enormous loss for public safety. We were headed inexorably toward military commissions for the 9/11 plotters. We don’t need to cut a bad deal to get it. Congress was not going to approve funding to transport trained terrorists to the U.S., nor to hold civilian trials.’ It wasn’t going to happen.
‘We’ve already got military commissions for some enemy combatants, and if we play this out, we are likely to get them for most if not all of the combatant war crimes trials. And we are likely to get them at Gitmo — the best place to have them, and the place on which the public has expended hundreds of millions of dollars to construct a safe, humane, fastidiously Islamo-friendly prison with state-of-the-art trial facilities.’ Hell I just saw a video of two Islamofascist terrorists playing soccer at Club Gitmo, with a soccer ball. So Andy’s point is here, this is just to get Lindsey Grahamnesty on board with the idea of closing Guantanamo and to give Grahamnesty something that was going to happen anyway. There was not going to be civil trials, there’s no money for it. Congress was not going to authorize the money, New York didn’t want it. Those trials were not going to happen. Obama gets, (imitating Obama) ‘Okay, well, I’ll give you the military commission, and I’ll go along with your idea of closing Guantanamo.’ That’s Andy McCarthy’s point of view, and I have yet to experience Andy being wrong on a national security issue involving Obama’s motives.