Political News Highlights and Controversy

Interesting analysis from Warner Todd Huston on Obama’s handling of detained terrorists:

Earlier this month President Obama fired Greg Craig, his main counsel on matters concerning the Guantanamo Bay Facility. And this week Obama sheds another one of his GITMO team with the resignation of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense for Detainee Policy, Phillip Carter.

It appears that Obama’s GITMO team is being systematically eliminated. One has to ask, why? The only real answer has to be that Obama is setting up some plausible deniability by firing or forcing the resignation of officials involved with GITMO policy. Once enough of these people are gone, Obama can look wide-eyed to the public and claim that he was badly served by his GITMO advisers and, therefore, it isn’t his fault.

Unfortunately for Obama the failure is not with the staff but with the chief himself, Obama.

Obama has allowed Attny Gen. Holder to reveal his utter ignorance by pushing for civilian trials of some GITMO detainees while at the same time arbitrarily denying such a privilege to others. Obama has also backed this plan despite that there is no precedent in American history for such trials.

And now the officials in charge of these decisions are being let go with no replacements announced, leaving mounting questions about just what the administrations policies are and who is responsible for carrying them out.

Outside of the foolishness of trying detained terrorists and enemy combatants in civilian courts there’s the added problem of Obama’s selective treatment of detained terrorists.

For instance, what of the Chinese Uighurs that Obama has sent to detainment on Palau?&nbsp Back in May the Obama administration ruled that these terrorists didn’t have a right to trials in civilian courts in the United States.&nbsp What gives?

Why does Khalid Sheik Mohammed get a trial in civilian courts, but the Uighurs get sent to Palau, a Pacific island nation that Obama bribed and coerced into taking them?  How can Obama say that some terrorists get trials in civilian US courts but others get permanent detainment in some out-of-sight-out-of-mind tropical paradise?

It doesn’t make any sense.

dwbens politics