Eric Holder adopts the Bush anti-terror architecture.
The Obama Administration did a full spinning reversal with a triple twist yesterday on its plans to prosecute terrorists announcing that it will now try September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay after all. We were going to applaud the Administration for sticking the national security dismount but then we saw Attorney General Eric Holder grouse through his press conference and say that he only took this step because Congress made him do it.
Members of Congress have intervened and imposed restrictions blocking the Administration from bringing any Guantanamo detainees to trial in the United States he said yesterday in spinning twist number one. The Justice Department was prepared to make a powerful case against the 9/11 defendants in federal court but the politics were causing too many delays on the trial and it couldnt wait any longer.
For the record we assume Mr. Holder is referring to the likes of New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and the Democrats who ran the Congress last year and passed a law that blocked the funding for civilian trials for Guantanamo detainees. Mr. Schumerno slouch at divining public opinionwas an early and vocal opponent of Mr. Holders brainstorm to try KSM in downtown Manhattan. And yesterday Mr. Schumer called the decision the final nail in the coffin of that wrong-headed idea.
Mr. Holders twist number twothat the delays in trying KSM are also Congresss faultis especially rich because Mr. Holder first proposed to try the mass killer in New York as long ago as November 2009. The public and Congress immediately revolted but Mr. Holder refused to bend and last year he was still telling the New Yorker that KSMs trial in a civilian court would be the defining event of my time as attorney general.
He was right about the defining part. His tenure has now been defined by one of the most overwhelming bipartisan Congressional policy repudiations in history.
Mr. Holders third twist was to assert that he and President Obama still intend to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But if that ever happens Mr. Holder will be long gone. Yesterdays Gitmo climb-down came after the Supreme Court rejected appeals from three Guantanamo detainees challenging their indefinite detention. If no other country will take them the detainees have nowhere else to go.
KSM and his fellow murderers will now be tried by military commissions of the kind that President George W. Bush proposed in the earliest days of the conflict formerly known as the war on terror. Someone should write the headline: Holder vindicates Ashcroft as in Mr. Bushs first AG. Or how about: Current State Department Counselor Harold Koh vindicates John Yoo the much-maligned Bush Justice Department official whose views on Presidential power have also been increasingly adopted by Team Obama.
Somehow we doubt well hear the same moral denunciations we once heard about Mr. Bushs policies. The Europeans are mute about Guantanamo and Newsweek hasnt come up with any more pseudo-scoops about Gitmo guards desecrating the Quran. Mr. Holder made clear hes not about to apologize much less thank his predecessors for their foresight but we suppose his vindication of Guantanamo is enough.
