NEOAVATARA

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/21/obama.speech/index.html

President Obama is learning what George W. Bush already knew:  there are no easy choices as commander-in-chief.

Thursday (in dueling conferences with former VP Dick Cheney), Obama laid out again his proposal to handle terror suspects.  This followed Democrats rejection of the current Obama plan, after voting against funding of the closure of Gitmo.

“One last group of detainees poses special challenges. Some 24 detainees have been ordered released by the U.S. courts. These court orders have absolutely nothing to do with the decision to close with Guantanamo. It has to do with the rule of law. The United States is a nation of laws, and we must abide by those laws,” the official said.

There will be four categories of terror suspects.  The first will be those that committed crimes in the U.S.; of course, I don’t how that will work, because anyone involved with 9/11 would fall into this category, no?  And they are among the highest value targets…

The second category will be those that can be safely transferred to other countries.  This category is so small, it isn’t even worthy of discussion.

The third category will be those that U.S. courts have stated should be released, including the Uighar Chinese that have been discussed before.  “One last group of detainees poses special challenges. Some 24 detainees have been ordered released by the U.S. courts. These court orders have absolutely nothing to do with the decision to close with Guantanamo. It has to do with the rule of law. The United States is a nation of laws, and we must abide by those laws,” a White House official said.

One problem; their home country is not willing to take them, and there is no where else to dump them. So where do you ‘release’ them?  I volunteer Chicago, San Francisco, and New York City.  Let the liberals deal with them, if they think it is such a easy problem.

The last category will be those that committed war crimes, and will be tried in military tribunals.  This will further irritate the agitators of the left.  Especially so, when they realize that this likely will be the default position for the administration.

In fact, this ‘new’ proposal by Obama is IDENTICAL to the Bush era policy.  They also tried people in the U.S., released them when they could, and used military tribunals.

So what’s the difference?  The only difference I can see is that Obama says everything that Bush did was terrible…and plans to repeat it.  In fact, he is going even farther, but suggesting that a few prisoners will need indefinite detentions, something the Bush Administration did not even suggest.  How he plans to legally hold prisoners indefinitely after Gitmo is close, of course, Obama nicely avoided.

The second difference is that Obama does plan to move some prisoners to the U.S., when he can.  Now, I have heard numerous liberal commentators defend this, stating that it is safe to bring them here.  I actually agree, in a sense.  I don’t think that a SuperMax prison is any less safe than Gitmo.  But there is a few other problems.  One, once arriving on U.S. soil, these terrorists now officially have Constitutional rights…and trying any of these guys using that standard is virtually impossible.  Sure, like a few terrorists that have been tried here (like the New York blind sheikh), if you have evidence here in the States, you may be able to get a conviction.   Additionally, once here in the U.S., if they somehow got off on a technicality, what do you do?  You would have to legally release them.  There would be no legal alternative.

The second, and possibly more dangerous, problem is that you are injecting a virus into the prison population.  We have evidence that terrorists jailed fromt the 1993 World Trade Center bombing have communicated information and have tried to coordinate terror attacks from their jail cells.  Again, once in the U.S., it is impossible to bar these people from communicating with others, including other prisoners and their own lawyers.  Mr. Obama never answered this basic question.

This was purely a political move. Obama sees that Cheney is actually winning this argument…something I thought would have been impossible a few months ago.  With Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid pouring gasoline on the fire, Obama is caught in an untenable position.

It gets only worse.  Obama apparently is shifting more of the burden of handling terrorists to foreign countries, even more so than the Bush Administration.  Of course, the practice of rendition was one on of the left’s biggest complaints of Bush era terrorism polices.  So, this puts Obama in a bind.  Either he admits that the Bush era policies are right (which, despite his protestations, is what his actions show), or create a new cache of problems by doing what the political left demands.

But, don’t feel too sorry for him…much of this chaos is of Obama’s own making.