Crossposted from Flopping Aces

Yesterday the Messiah uttered these brilliant words:

And, you know, let’s take the example of Guantanamo. What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.

And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, ‘Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.

Whoa…where to start?

First, this kind of mindset is what helped cause 9/11 in the first place. al-Qaeda sat and watched as we fooled around with arresting a few people and then washed our hands of the whole terrorism threat until the next attack occurred. Khobar happened and what did we do? Try to treat it as a law enforcement issue. The African embassies? Same thing….as well as the Cole. Oh sure, Clinton would send a few missiles into Afghanistan or bomb a aspirin factory to try to at least “look” like he was doing something about the threat (while alleging Saddam had ties to the factory that AQ used to produce chemical weapons to boot….GASP! Saddam had ties to AQ? No way!) but in the end Osama and pals viewed us as weak. And with that kind of leadership we were.

They didn’t count on a strong leader to change the way this country does business like George W. Bush. Thank god.

Oh, and lets not forget that the criminal trial led to the disclosure through discovery that we were listening to Osama. We all know happened after that.

And now our Supreme Court says the same enemy must have access to our courts and the same kind of discovery. Mind boggling stupidity and Obama loves it.

Secondly we have to look at this part of Obama’s statement:

we were able to arrest those responsible

Wrongo boyo! Jim Geraghty sets him straight and wouldn’t you know it….it involved Iraq once again:

No, not all of them. Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi native, was twice interrogated by the FBI and then allowed to walk away a free man. He fled the United States in the days after that attack and returned, with the assistance of officials at the Iraqi embassy in Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad. He lived openly in Baghdad with his father and a neighbor interviewed in 1994 by an ABC News/Newsweek investigative team told the reporters that he was working for the Iraqi regime.

There are conflicting reports about how Saddam Hussein treated Yasin after these reports were made public, with some documentation suggesting the Iraqis were holding him under some form of house arrest and other documents that seem to indicate he was being actively harbored — given housing and living allowances — by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

What is not in dispute, however, is that Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services helped Yasin return to Iraq mere days after he helped orchestrate the 1993 World Trade Center attack. According to the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee report on Prewar Intelligence (signed by all of the panel’s Democrats): “Abdul Rahman Yasin, a fugitive from the attack, is of Iraqi descent, and in 1993, he fled to Iraq with Iraqi assistance.”

Beyond the fact that Obama seems to have been unaware of Yasin’s flight and the role Saddam Hussein’s regime played in it is his odd embrace of law enforcement as the proper way to treat terrorists. It’s as if he wasn’t paying attention in the 1990s.

Oh, he was paying attention. From the pews of the Trinity church as the pastor told him that these attacks were all our fault anyways.

Now this part of his statement is downright funny:

we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, ‘Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.

Whoakay…..

I think Allah tackles this well:

Is he so naive as to seriously believe wacko jihadis draw some huge distinction between the legitimacy of Gitmo and the legitimacy of district court trials? Exit quotation from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

“I cannot accept any attorney who is not governed by sharia [Islamic] law. I will represent myself. I will not be represented by anybody even if he is a Muslim, because he will be sworn to your American Constitution. I consider all the U.S. Constitution and laws evil. They are allowing for same-sexual marriages and many things that are very bad … Do you understand what I said?”

This is so obviously not about preventing terrorist attacks for Obama. This is about making himself and this country look good to those who hate us. Our nations security be damned.

McCain smelled blood with this ignorant comment from Obama and wasted no time:

“Barack Obama’s belief that we should treat terrorists as nothing more than common criminals demonstrates a stunning and alarming misunderstanding of the threat we face from radical Islamic extremism. Obama holds up the prosecution of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 as a model for his administration, when in fact this failed approach of treating terrorism simply as a matter of law enforcement rather than a clear and present danger to the United States contributed to the tragedy of September 11th. This is change that will take us back to the failed policies of the past and every American should find this mindset troubling.”

Right on target.

How does Obama respond? By trying to take some of it back:

My quote, the point I was making and I’ve made before, is without giving full blown rights to those who are being held, we can set up a system of due process, and when I said that the administration didn’t even try to do that, what I have consistently said is that rather than figure out how do we effectively hold these folks, detain them, provide them with some due process, try them, lock them up, the administration decided to take a bunch of short cuts.”…

“We don’t have to treat them in the same way that we would treat a criminal suspect in the U.S., but we should abide by the Geneva conventions. We should at least follow through on the same principals we followed though when dealing with Nazis during Nuremburg, that is not only the right thing to do but it also actually will strengthen our ability over the long term to fight terrorism.”

Asked by Richard Wolffe of Newsweek what he would suggest be done with detainees, Obama said “we can lock them up in military facilities on U.S. soil in the same way that we locked them up in Gitmo. The reason we set up Gitmo is because the administration wanted to set up a black hole where there was no accountability whatsoever…

“It does not have to be before a U.S. district court,” Obama said, “but if we provided some modicum of due process, we can have confidence that we’ve got the right people, that we’re not wasting time on the wrong people. We can send a message to the world that we continue to abide by the standards of rule of law, and we can actually be more effective in our pursuit of terrorism.”

Um, it was Congress that set up the trial process, the same Congress he is currently in. Not the Administration. Also, the Supreme Court just ruled it DOES have to be before a U.S. district court…..did he not get the memo?

Be that it may, would you call this a flip? Or a flop?

I call it ignorance. And dangerous ignorance at that.

More here.

also:

The Iraq SOFAs and the SCOTUS opinion

Possibly one of the best, and most honest overviews of the Iraq SOFA negotiations comes from Omar Fadhil in his article today at the Long War Journal. Unlike most news outlets that state their content with such conviction, Fadhil points out that understanding each of the factions beefs is especially difficult since little about the negotiation specifics are known at this time to *any* one.

Or, as he puts it, the details “are rarely shared beyond the closed circle of the executive branches in Washington and Baghdad, leaving lawmakers in both countries in the dark for now. Personally, I think this is wise because too many voices prior to hammering out a starting point draft is anything but productive.

Despite the lack of details, there are varying levels of acceptance and rejection for what basics they do know. And knowing these objections is valuable for even the first SOFA draft. Oddly enough, there are only two groups with an absolute no-compomise/reject attitude. That would be the Association of Muslim scholars, and Sadr’s clan.

The Muslim scholars are Sunni clerics, formed in April 2003 after the fall of Saddam to unite the Sunni ulema, the highest Iraq sunni authorities. Their historic sympathies lie with Saddam’s old regime and AQ. However the AMSI has found their support by Sunnis significantly diminishing since “the awakening” of tribal leaders, and perhaps had their biggest setback last November when Sheikh Ahmed Abdul Ghafour al Samarrai, the leader of the Sunni Religious Endowments (more clerics…) ordered the closure of the AMSI headquarters in the Umm al Quraa mosque.

As reported by Bill Roggio in the Long War Journal:

The crackdown on the Association of Muslim Scholars is part of the efforts of Sunni scholars to delegitimize the religious support given to al Qaeda in Iraq and other radical Islamic extremist groups in Iraq. The creation of the Council of Iraqi Scholars, or Council of Ulema of Iraq, has led the way in alienating the radical clerics.

The Council of Iraqi Scholars was formed in early April 2007 after over 60 senior Sunni clerics gathered in Amman, Jordan. The religious leaders sought to wrest control of the religious edicts, or fatwas, issued by the radical clerics in the Association of Muslim Scholars. Sheikh Abdul Malik al Saadi, Iraq’s preeminent Sunni scholar, leads the council. Samarrai is also an influential member and acts as the council’s spokesman.

Likewise, Sadr’s having a hard time generating enough protesters against the SOFA negotiations. From Fadhil’s article today:

Earlier crowds are estimated to be in the thousands. The most recent public protest in Karbala was, according to The Associated Press, attended by “hundreds.” Protests in Sadr City, the bastion of the Mahdi Army, drew 1,500 protesters last Friday.

With the two “naysayers” losing support, and basically out of the way, this brings us to the majority who agree a SOFA is necessary in some form. Last week, two Iraqi Assembly members traveled to DC and addressed Congress.

Khalaf Ilayan, a leader of one of the three components of the Accord Front, favors waiting until the new POTUS sits in the Oval Office. His peer, Nadeem Jabiri of the Islamic Fadheela Party, concerns himself with Iraq “sovereignty”, and their practical progress as a bureaucratic body.

“The Iraqi government right now still does not have full rein of its sovereignty because of the thousands of foreign troops now on its land. … And perhaps the Iraqi government does not have yet sufficient tools to run its own internal affairs. Therefore I ask the American government not to embarrass the Iraqi government (by) putting it in a difficult situation with this agreement.”

Both observations, IMHO, have merit. And indeed, despite the ill-timing of the December 2008 expiration of the UN mandate, it may be premature to lock in such long term specifics while the pieces on the chess board are moving. Not only will there be a new POTUS, but even more importantly, Iraq has provincial elections coming up. The Sunni bloc membership is apt to have a significant profile change… and most likely for the better as Sunni leadership from the awakening movement are strong shoe ins.

But I’m not posting to discuss what we don’t know on the negotiations, or their not-so-convenient timing. What I want to do is remind everyone of the common thread here – the very important link between these upcoming SOFAs and our recent SCOTUS opinion.

Or more succinctly put, the agreed to sovereignty of our Iraq bases affects the detention, rights and protections of any combatants the US harbors there. And last, but not least, that agreement will also affect the rights and protections of our US soldiers and support civilian contractors.

Sounds familiar now, don’t it? While we don’t have details, Iraqis discussing yielding sovereignty as a point of contention may infer that US bases in Iraq are demanding sovereignty as a preferred contractual point. If that is the case, as SCOTUS has ruled, Habeas Corpus and combatants with Constitutional rights leers it’s head yet again.

If no sovereignty, what of our own troops? Will they (and the support civilian contractors) will be subject to the many harsh Saddam regime laws still on the books? Will US military and American citizens find themselves in front of Iraq judges for crimes considered un Islamic?

If the Pentagon has got a clue… they’ll demand the sovereignty for our guys, but won’t be holding any of the bad guys (who’ll race for their attorneys upon arrest) at that location. In short, the SCOTUS decision has had the over reaching effect to limit some aspects and useage of these proposed US temporary bases in Iraq. This recent reality may dictate some new concerns in terms for these SOFAs.

Put your imagination in fast forward… landing after the musical chairs of Iraq Assembly and POTUS leadership. Assuming we get a friendlier Sunni bloc after provincial elections, which POTUS will be defining the SOFA demands for US interests? Certainly if McCain wins, he has already said he supports bases there for as long as the Iraqis needs and mission demands. But what are his ideas of terms for these bases? McCain was appalled with this SCOTUS opinion. Does he know how these SOFAs can mirror the same problem if not structured correctly?

And what of Obama, and his ever morphing stance? (see Curt’s “Once Before, and Again and Again” post) Will BHO be taking this SOFA agreement into consideration for soldiers, detainees and contractors? If there is no agreement, and the UN mandate isn’t renewed, what happens then? Does BHO pull us out immediately, saying any Iraq failures are not his fault because the agreement wasn’t hammered out in time?

I’d say it’s about time for some bright lightbulb reporter to begin hounding Obama *and* McCain on some real Iraq specifics… like this SOFA agreement… and their idea of needed terms in a post-Boumediene opinion world. It’s not enough to say “no permanent bases”, because we’re already quite outspoken in the fact the bases are not permanent.

What begs to be asked is how can this SOFA best be constructed to provide protections to our American soldiers and civilians, without giving the same to captured combatants?

This oughta be good… I’m dying to hear their answers because I’m not sure that both can be accomplished. And if one has to be sacrificed, which will it be?