Right Wing Nut House

My latest is up at PJ Media where I talk about leadership and Obama’s lack thereof:

The towering personalities of those narratives were largely trapped by forces of history that, try as they might, they couldn’t bend to their will in order to alter destiny. Lincoln put it best when he said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

Lincoln could only ride the tsunami, not direct it. The ageless desire for freedom, the growing agitation for equality, the westward expansion of peoples and ideas, the rising shame over the sin of slavery, the greed of industrialists, the incomprehensible hypocrisy of a nation that boasted of its freedoms while keeping millions in chains, the emergence of free labor and a nascent labor movement — this and more was in the wave that Lincoln was trying to ride. He was successful only insofar as he was able to identify those things he could control, and those he could not. It was his particular genius, and you certainly can’t expect every president to be gifted with such insight.

But in Barack Obama’s case, events have gotten far the better of him. And most tellingly, he seems unable to see anything that he can control, settling for blaming his predecessor and promising to do better.

In these times, with the challenges he is facing, that simply isn’t good enough.

Obama is riding the wave without realizing he’s even on the water. And to make matters worse, he apparently can’t swim. The analogy of a “deer in headlights” seems harsh but that is a judgment of some of the Washington press corps.

[...]

His allies and apologists claim that this demonstrates the president’s “coolness.” Nice try, but that just doesn’t cut it. Coolness is telling your wife when you’re on a stretcher with a bullet an inch from your heart that you hope all the doctors are Republicans. Obama’s “coolness” appears to be an aloofness — perhaps even an arrogance — that manifests itself in the curious way in which he views “leadership.” Giving inspiring speeches is very nice (although it’s been a while since we got one of those), and feeling people’s pain is very politically correct these days.

But political leadership is more than delivering pretty words and demonstrating political empathy. It is projecting the ability — whether it is present or not — to identify a problem and make the rest of us partners in addressing it. Leadership engages those being led, makes them part of the enterprise, inspires confidence that collective action will make a difference. In short, leadership is a two-way street. You can’t lead if no one is willing to follow.

When the president speaks, it is usually to lecture, or to have his rhetoric take flight, mouthing meaningless platitudes that fail to inspire but allowing us to feel good about ourselves. “No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a AAA country,” sniffed the president during his speech Monday. Does that inspire you? It seems despairingly banal to me.

In some ways, it’s frightening to consider the idea of a president in over his head. This has been pretty obvious since the stim bill when he farmed out the writing of it to radicals like Pelosi and political hacks like Reid. It is now generally believed even among the president’s supporters that it didn’t work. Of course, they say it’s because it wasn’t big enough. But the fact that a president with a near 70% approval rating couldn’t do just about anything he wanted with huge majorities in both chambers bespeaks a singular lack of leadership on what was supposed to be his administration’s primal thrust.

The bottom line is that Obama doesn’t recognize those things within his control. Events are controlling him, which is a bad place for a leader to be.

There are times I want to grab some tea party folk by the neck and try and shake some sense in them. Many of them are, indeed, unreasonable and illogical. Advocating not raising the debt ceiling, forcing the government to cut about 40% of the budget in one year, may not be terrorism but they might as well support detonating an atom bomb in New York City considering the similar effect it would have on the economy. You don’t snatch a trillion and a half dollars out of the economy and not see a collapse of some kind. And if it is Gotterdammerung they seek, let them self-immolate and achieve their irrational goals that way.

But really, it is ridiculous to call this a “Tea Party Downgrade.” There was never, ever a chance that the debt ceiling wouldn’t be raised. Less than 100 tea partiers in the House and a few in the Senate could never have blocked the Congress from raising the debt limit. In fact, it was useful for both sides to use that non-existent threat in order to try and get their way.

The 11th hour nature of the debt deal was pre-ordained. Both sides were going to take the talks to the absolute limit before papering over their differences and reaching an agreement. This is the way things are done in Washington — pandering to both bases, both sides playing politics to the hilt, until at the last possible moment, order is restored and a deal is inked.

Right now, a gigantic game of “Pretend” is being played by those who are blaming the tea party for what appears to be a political decision by S&P to lower our credit rating. Both sides are elevating the tea party far beyond their actual influence, pretending that they were obstructionist hooligans who almost caused a catastrophe. Or, in the case of Republicans, well meaning activists whose whims had to be catered to on the spending issue lest Boehner and other Republicans end up being primaried by tea party candidates. This is nonsense. The Tea Party doesn’t have that kind of electoral clout. And while they may score a victory here and there (Senator Lugar seems especially vulnerable), their candidates were soundly defeated in primaries against most GOP incumbents in 2010. (They fared much better in open primaries but only 32% of Tea Party backed candidates won in the general election.)

Pretending what isn’t so in this case was extremely useful to both sides; it gave Boehner an excuse to rule out tax increases and gave Obama a foil upon which he could impale the Republicans while agreeing to a deal without an increase in taxes. Obama, running for re-election, knows full well that raising taxes on anybody - even the rich - is bad politics in an election season. It is not surprising that he “caved” on the tax issue — a stratagem, the logic of which has escaped his more rabid liberal supporters.

I can’t believe that John Boehner didn’t know that no deal he came up with would satisfy the radical libertarians and far right wackos who supported sending the American economy to guillotine. I predicted back in May that there was no deal save balancing the budget now, today, that would placate the extremists who are the most visible members (but not a majority) of the tea party. In fact, if they supported any agreement, it would be the end of them. The Tea Party exists to be contrarians, naysaying is their lifeblood. They cannot exist as majoritarians. The movement would collapse under its own internal contradictions if they ever did achieve power. How could a movement that is, at bottom, anti-government actually run the government?

Neither can I believe that President Obama didn’t realize the same, exact, thing. Thus, this game of Pretend where both sides brought us to the brink, playing out their political games, all the while knowing full well they would come to some kind of arrangement - even if, as it turned out, that the agreement was largely meaningless as a deficit reduction deal.

We are not going to address our deficit problems until our economy is a smoking ruin. Every European nation currently at or near default never addressed their problems either and are now paying for the fact that it is not in the nature of democracies to deal with such intractable issues. Democracy is about consensus and compromise. But the politics that fleshes out a democratic form of government is, unfortunately, made up of politicians, freely elected by the people, who can be unelected in a heartbeat if they were to inflict the kind of pain that will be necessary to solve our spending problems.

The Tea Party doesn’t care about the pain. Like small children, they know what they want and they want it now. But this only makes them juvenile delinquents, not terrorists. They might get some credit for altering the conversation in Washington to reflect the reality that we have a spending problem, but their unrealistic solutions should receive our disapprobation.

There is no way to get spending under control without cutting entitlements and raising taxes. The longer we wait, the higher the taxes and the more we’ll have to cut. It’s a matter of arithmetic now. The administration’s own estimates have us running up $9 trillion more in debt over the next ten years. And that’s with pie in the sky estimates of growth and the nonsensical notion that interest rates won’t rise, thus massively increasing the amount we pay to service our debt.

Within this coming decade, the dollar will no longer be the world’s reserve currency, we will probably be downgraded further, we will experience at least another recession - or two - and since neither side has the answer to the crisis, we will probably see a string of one term presidents and control of the legislature see-sawing back and forth every two to four years.

And then? Terra Incognito as the ancient mariners used to call uncharted waters. If I’m lucky, I won’t live to see it.

What is the real issue that was being discussed during the debt limit debate? I make that the subject of my PJM piece today:

Government has grown so big that it is impossible to control. Have we ever asked how any government purportedly representing a free people can possibly oversee, manage, direct, command, administer, or even comprehend such complexity as our federal government today? One president, 535 members of Congress, and nine Supreme Court judges cannot even remotely grasp what they have wrought in our names. Yes, the president has cabinet officers who are supposed to ride herd on their departments. But even if they are competent, intelligent, and dedicated public servants, how much can they truly grasp of their department’s total impact on citizens?

My colleague at PJMedia, David Steinberg, had some similar thoughts a few months ago. After listing a mind-boggling number of commissions, departments, agencies, and programs that make up some of what our government does, Steinberg wrote:

What is Big Government?

It is our time: It is oxidizing, the aging process applied to civilization and turning us to dust. Big Government is nothing less than the consumption of our very moment here on Earth, our lives spent creating and producing. Take our works and humanity, skim from the top, then the middle until we were not here.

No man’s time is another’s to waste, not politics but morality. This stupid, stupid list is our government, and the creators of this owe an answer to their benefactors — an answer to a question neither about the politics or the theory, as none of that is relevant to the actual government that exists as people working at the above agencies, being paid from the profits, and then the principal, of civilization.

He’s right. But what do you do about it? Cutting spending doesn’t get at the root of the disease. It only treats the symptom. Unless we can confront the central question of what government should be doing, and come to some kind of rough consensus about the Leviathan’s role in American society, we are striking out blindly in an effort to tame it.

First, figure out what we want government to do, then fund it. The federal budget, as written, embodies what we think government should be doing for us. Thousands and thousands of pages of programs, services, agency budgets — $3.8 trillion that represents the hopes and aspirations of the people, as well as security, and life and livelihood to tens of millions. Incomprehensible? To a degree, yes. But the budget was not created by aliens and plopped on Obama’s desk. We created it. It’s all ours. And the idea that we can’t have a thorough and rational debate about what’s in that budget — that most of it is off limits or out of bounds — is absurd.

It’s a chimera, of course — this idea that we would ever really make the attempt to understand what government is doing and seek to define its limits or curtail its power. For many on the left, there are no limits. In the name of “social justice,” or some hazy definition of “equality,” the untrammeled growth of government is a necessity. The beast will eventually consume us because there is a sizable portion of the population that doesn’t want a rational discussion about the size or the nature of government in a free society, preferring the status quo with government spending on autopilot and the engineer asleep at the switch.

My latest up at PJ Media.

If it was some frothing-at-the-mouth liberal blogger calling Republicans “terrorists,” we could dismiss it as the mindless babblings of a hyperpartisan nitwit.

But incredibly, it is not. It is leading Democrats including the vice president of the United States who are referring to their fellow Americans who disagree with them as terrorists:

Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having “acted like terrorists” in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit, according to several sources in the room.

Biden was agreeing with a line of argument made by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) at a two-hour, closed-door Democratic Caucus meeting.

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

It is New York Times columnists:

You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

It’s MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who not only referred to conservatives as “terrorists, but also as “wahhabis of American government.”

In fact, referencing terrorists, or Osama bin Laden, or al-Qaeda when describing conservatives who decided to put their foot down and demand a change in how Washington works - this done in order to save the country from a fate worse than default in a few years - has been the du jour pastime among Democrats of all levels. “Hostage takers” is another bric-a-brac tossed around when describing Republicans as well.

All of this name calling is supposed to remind the public that the tea party and those who agree with them are “extremists.”

My latest is up at FPM and I take a look at the so-called “reform” that the Syrian parliament passed that would theoretically allow opposition political parties.

Guess what. The law does no such thing:

But it is in this new draft law regarding political parties that Assad’s hypocrisy has reached its zenith. Not only is there no chance that any opposition will ever challenge the Baath party to govern the country, the rules for these new parties to be certified are designed to make sure that Assad maintains a firm grip on the political life of the country. First, there is a prohibition of parties based on religion, tribe, denomination or profession. While this will keep Islamist parties from forming, it will also make it difficult for Syrian citizens to create natural political allegiances. Secondly, there is a threshold of members that must be crossed before a party can be legalized. Anwar Al Bounni, who is head of the Syrian Center for Legal Studies and Research in Damascus, told CNN, “The law stipulates that any political party needs to have at least 2,000 members representing at least seven Syrian provinces before being active.”

The third roadblock that Assad has placed in the way of any real political opposition is the manner in which a party must be certified. Bounni pointed out that a party cannot be legalized unless a committee made up of the interior minister, a judge, and three other members appointed by the president give their assent. This, for all practical purposes, means that few, if any, parties will be allowed to function.

Elliot Abrams , whose experience in government goes back to the Reagan administration, was contemptuous of Assad’s reform efforts. He referred to the “unrivaled standard of hypocrisy” by Assad in this instance being “prizewinning.” He quotes a Reuters dispatch on the government’s stipulation that the new parties must have “a commitment to the constitution, democratic principles, the rule of law and a respect for freedom and basic rights.” Abrams writes, “Of course, were parties in Syria actually required to be committed to democracy and human rights, much less the rule of law, the Baath Party itself would be viewed–accurately–as a criminal organization.”

Gee guys…what can I say? I blew it when I accused you, and other peace loving extremist Muslim groups of having a hand in that Norway operation yesterday. I mean, what can I do to make it up to you? Cut off my own head? Drown myself in boiling oil? How about if I chopped off my hand and mailed it to you? Would that make you feel better?

Anyway, there are several VERY important people who are demanding that I apologize for getting it wrong. Well, not me specifically. I knew it was a right wing nut all along. Soon as I heard about it, I said “Yep. Christian conservatives did this.” The tell-tale massive explosions close together. And then there was that carnage at the youth camp. Only Christian conservatives - and you - carry out attacks like that. And since we’ve blamed a lot of terrorism on you guys over the last decade (here’s a list of Muslim terrorist acts over the last two months - pretty impressive, I must say!) I figured that we ought to give someone else a chance to get blamed. Blond haired, blue eyed European terrorists have been in short supply since the Red Brigades and Baider-Manhoff retired. Nice to see we white people are making a comeback in this sphere.

So Glenn Greenwald thinks we do you a disservice when blaming you for any old terrorist attack that comes down the pike:

Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn’t, even when it’s allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist… we’ve seen repeatedly: that Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target.

He’s right, ya know. You’ve given us very little cause to “dislike” you. I mean, what’s a few thousand infidels being incinerated, more or less? We make far too big a deal out of people dying. After all, it happens all the time, every day in fact. Just a part of life.

Greenwald has a valid point. Terrorism has no “objective” meaning. It could mean Eric Rudolph blowing up the Olympics. Or some Christian wacko murdering an abortion doctor. Or Glenn Greenwald inflicting more of his tortured logic on an unsuspecting world (OK - maybe not terrorism but it’s annoying as hell.)

But Allah forbid it ever mean that 95% of the acts of terror committed on this planet is carried out by friendly Muslim fanatics like you. This “objective” truth must never be uttered lest we hurt your feelings. Far better to point to blond, blue eyed righty extremists as the true terrorists of the world and blame them first when some nutcase breaks into a meeting and starts screaming “Allahu akbar!” while spraying automatic gunfire into the crowd. After all, maybe the perp dyed his hair black, and is only pretending to be a Muslim.

So for what it’s worth, I apologize. From now on, I give all Muslim terrorists the benefit of the doubt and will hold my literary fire until you tell us that you’re the guilty party.

It’s not only the fair thing to do. It’s the right thing to do.

James Fallows sounds upset that bloggers jumped the gun in speculating that al-Qaeda or Islamic terrorists were responsible for the attack in Oslo yesterday:

No, this is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too tedious to reserve judgment about horrifying events rather than instantly turning them into talking points for pre-conceived views. On a per capita basis, Norway lost twice as many people today as the U.S. did on 9/11. Imagine the political repercussions through the world if double-9/11-scale damage had been done by an al-Qaeda offshoot. The unbelievably sweeping damage is there in either case. For an example of a sober, dignified, shocked but resolute and democratic way to respond to national tragedy, see the moving and impressive speech by Norway’s Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, here. (Thanks to M. Fullilove.)

Seven Seventeen hours after the Post item went up, six sixteen hours after its claims were shown to be false and hysterical, it’s still there, with no correction or apology.

I don’t recall Fallows making a big deal out of the left’s snort-worthy attempt to capitalize politically on the Giffords’ shooting in Phoenix last January. Before the smell of gunpowder had dissipated, liberal blogs and commentators were blaming the tea party, Sarah Palin, a months-old “bullseye” map of targeted congressional districts, and “hate speech” by righties. This despite the fact that Jarold Loughner, the shooter, had a mind so broken and bereft of reason and logic that the idea he had any motivation for shooting the congresswoman beyond his own warped, paranoid imaginings was silly. And yet, the same “jumping the gun” on culprits and accessories to the crime occurred then as it happened yesterday in Oslo with the immediate blame for the attack being pinned on Islamists.

The same sort of nonsense occurred when Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll was released from her captivity in Iraq and right wing blogs piled on her statements that seemed to be solicitous of her captors. Without waiting to hear from Carroll about why she made those statements (she was coerced), several bloggers put out information hinting that she was a closet al-Qaeda sympathizer. At the time, I wrote:

In people’s haste to be first, or different, or just plain ornery and contrary (all the better to get links and readers) a culture of “shoot first and ask questions later” has arisen in the blogosphere that quite frankly, is proving every bad thing that the MSM has been saying about blogs from the beginning. Many of us - including myself - have been guilty in the past of hitting that “Publish” button when perhaps it would have been prudent and proper to take a beat or two to think about what we just wrote and the impact it might have beyond the small little world we inhabit in this corner of Blogland.

I wrote that in 2006 and, if anything, it has gotten worse on both sides of the political divide. On the left, blaming the right for the Giffords shooting had been proceeded by a similar exercise in stupidity when a shooter, hell bent on committing “police suicide,” murdered three policemen in Pittsburgh. Before anything was known about the perpetrator, the left was screaming about the telling news that a book by Sean Hannity had been found in the murderer’s home. Despite evidence that emerged later that his motivation was to draw down on police and die at their hands, no “apologies” as Mr. Fallows demands from Jen Rubin were forthcoming.

James Joyner doesn’t necessarily give those who jumped on the Muslim terrorist bandwagon a pass, but his explanation is logical:

When tragedies are unfolding and information is scant, however, the incentives are to get as much information out as fast as possible, even if much of it is inaccurate. And as much air time as possible is filled with “experts,” whose expertise is often tangentially related to the crisis and are hamstrung by the need for rampant speculation, to do instant analysis. The inevitable result is that they will fall into their comfort zone, analyzing by drawing analogies with past events that have some similarities.

We’ve now shifted from “this is Norway’s 9/11? to “this is Norway’s Oklahoma City.”

The investigators still don’t have complete information about this monstrous crime and they’re almost certainly not sharing everything they have with us. But, if the Oklahoma City analogy holds up, it would be fitting in one respect: The instant analysis in Oklahoma City was that it was the work of Islamist groups. While a natural assumption two years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, it was completely wrong.

We can’t all write for The Atlantic and wallow in the luxury of being able to sit back, wait for events to sort themselves out, and then pontificate on how someone else who is paid to post and comment on breaking news got it wrong. The immediate speculation that it was a Muslim terrorist attack wasn’t widespread; it was universal. First reports of a Muslim terrorist group (that we now know doesn’t exist) claimed responsibility for the attack contributed to the notion that it was al-Qaeda or one of their murderous imitators who carried out the attack.

But was the promotion of a political agenda at work as well? As with previous instances where bloggers jumped the gun on assigning motives or intent to a fast breaking news story, trying to be first in order to garner links and readers took second place to advancing a particular political point of view. Speculation was unavoidable. But how much did our prejudices and pre-conceived ideas about terrorism lead most of us to get it so wrong?

It is the nature of the beast, as Joyner says. But perhaps the beast has learned a small lesson and next time, will reign in the natural desire to promote a particular agenda at the expense of the facts.

My latest at FPM is about the security handovers in Afghanistan and the enormous challenges facing the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai.

A sample:

Perhaps the biggest question mark is the Afghan government itself and the performance of its mercurial president. The shock of losing his half-brother and close adviser, Ahmed Wali Karzai, last week was compounded when another close confidant, Jan Mohammed Khan, was killed by a suicide bomber in Kabul on Monday. Some in Afghanistan are questioning whether Karzai’s government can survive once the handover is complete. One member of parliament told the Guardian newspaper, “These killings show the weakness of failure of Karzai’s politics. The situation is crisis. Karzai has lost control of the country.”

In fact, Karzai is scrambling to fill the void of his half-brother’s death, casting about for someone who can fill the hole in his leadership circle in Kandahar province, the most crucial area of the country. According to the Washington Post, several candidates are being considered, including Gul Agha Shirzai, the governor of eastern Nangahar province, who would replace the current governor of Kandahar. But tribal jealousies — Shirzai is of a different tribe than Karzai — might make that choice problematic.

Regardless, the dual blow of losing two of his closest advisers has jolted Karzai’s government and knocked it off-balance at an important juncture. The security handovers in Helmand province (Lashkar Gah), Bamiyan province in central Afghanistan, and Lagham province (Mihtarlam) are being seen as a test case for the government’s ability to keep the peace and build trust with citizens in order to extend the influence of the Karzai administration into the provinces. At the handover ceremony in Mihtarlam, British General James Bucknall, deputy commander of the International Security Assistance Force, said, “There will be plenty of challenges ahead, security and otherwise, as Mihtarlam progresses through transition over the coming months[.]”

And the biggest of those challenges will be finding out just how well the newly-trained Afghanistan police force performs under pressure. NATO soldiers will still be stationed nearby, but they will take their orders from the Afghanistan security services. The police force has been built from scratch, trained by NATO, but suffers from both a shortage of personnel and lack of equipment.

ABC News spent 6 days prior to the handover roaming the city of Mihtarlam talking to residents and officials. What the news outlet discovered is disturbing. There were only a “few dozen” officers patrolling a city of 100,000, which is “like asking the New Orleans Police Department to maintain security with fewer than 100 cops.”

Police officials do not patrol with armored trucks, despite the presence of IEDs, nor do they have bulletproof vests. In fact, the police do not patrol at all, according to ABC. US mentors have been urging the police to get out into the neighborhoods, but instead, the officers “would set up checkpoints and respond to emergencies, but they were not familiarizing themselves with the city they now officially protect.”

And there are troubling signs that citizens are not very accepting of their new security shield. When police officers caught a man trying to plant an IED, they chased him down only to have angry villagers confront them and drive them back. “There’s no intimidation factor,” says a special forces soldier who mentors the Afghan security forces. “They walk down the street, they have no vests, no helmets, and nobody is scared of them.” A senior aide to President Karzai told ABC that it might take 10 years before cities have functioning police departments. “The Taliban will continue to use suicide attackers and IEDs,” says the precinct captain. He added, “But if we receive the right equipment and more men, we will be ok.”

Read the rest here.

I have been remiss in publishing links to my work around the web lately. Allow me to rectify that:

My latest was published at FPM today about the planned massive demonstration today in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Protestors are angered at the slow pace of change and want the military to step aside for a civilian “transnational council” that would rule until elections were held - now put off till probably December.

On 7/12, I had another piece at FPM “Syria Embassy Attack: The Last Straw?” which gave some background on the attack on the US embassy in Damascus. Assad bused in hundreds of thugs to attack both our and the French consulate. It was in response to a visit to Hama by our ambassador to stand in solidarity with the Syrian people in their right to protest.

On 7/11, my FPM piece was on the “The Peaceful Palestinian ‘Fly-In’ Lie.” So many useful idiots - so little time to list them all.

Finally, the brand new PJ Media Lifestyles page was the venue for my short blog post on Falling Skies and why it might go all PC on us.

Enjoy. Political writing to return at any moment so stay tuned.

There are serious issues that the administration is apparently dismissing as they insist that trying all terrorists in federal court is the best way to combat terrorism.

I am sympathetic to the argument that whenever possible, terrorism related crimes should be tried by the regular courts. The Holy Land Foundation trial is a good example of this, where various Muslim “charities” were caught funneling money to Hamas. Other terrorist financing cases have been successfully prosecuted in civilian courts, and even FBI “stings” involving  home grown terrorists plotting mayhem might conceivably be better off being tried in federal court.

But for genuine, committed terrorists who are a danger to the entire world, a military tribunal and indefinite detention appears to be the only option. Civilization should have a trap door for these extremists, and granting them the extra protections afforded defendants in civilian courts is not only dangerous but a waste of time. As I point out in my FPM piece today, even if Mr. Warsame, the Somali captured in April and brought to New York to stand trial, is acquitted, he isn’t going anywhere. He will be sent to the “Supermax” prison in Colorado to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Is it really that important that the rest of the world will think better of us if we allow a defense lawyer in federal court to make a circus out of the proceedings?

A sample from my FPM piece:

Obama’s new policy seeks to avoid the “tainted fruit” charges made by defense attorneys for terrorists who argued that some evidence used in court or offered during the military tribunals was the result of interrogations where the suspect was not apprised of his rights, or illegal methods were used to obtain the evidence.

This was the major problem during the 2010 trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, charged with more than 280 counts of murder and conspiracy in the bombing of our embassies in Africa in 1998. A pre-trial ruling by the judge denied the prosecution the testimony of a key witness who sold the explosives to Ghailiani, because the government learned of the sale when interrogating the witness at Guantanamo. Ghailiani was acquitted of all but one charge of conspiracy to destroy government property.

There were many who argued at the time that Ghailiani had no business being tried in a civilian court anyway, and that a military tribunal would have worked much better at bringing him to justice. Whether or not that supposition is true, it is a fact that Ghailiani was sentenced to life in prison without parole and is currently incarcerated at the “Supermax” detention facility in Colorado, along with other participants in the embassy bombings. His fate was ultimately no different than if he had been tried at Guantanamo, which raises serious questions about the efficacy of civilian trials in the first place.

But by keeping Warsame’s interrogations separate, with a clear wall between the CIA’s national security interrogations and the FBI’s efforts to gather evidence for trial, the administration is hoping to avoid the problems that emerged in the Ghailiani case, and that they can satisfy critics who worry that placing a terrorist in the court system is a wasted opportunity to glean significant intelligence from suspects. They also hope to satisfy their own supporters who believe Guantanamo should be closed and all terrorism suspects tried in federal court.

Judging by the reaction from both sides to Warsame’s indictment, it appears that the administration has failed to convince anybody that their new policy is the answer.

This is Obama manufacturing a policy not based on the reality of the situation, but rather on the political calculation that he must do something differently than George Bush. I’m not sure that a defense strategy wouldn’t try to claim that Warsame should have been mirandized by the CIA and that anything from those interrogations should not be allowed. Rules of evidence is one reason why a tribunal is preferrable to a civilian trial in some cases.

In the end, it won’t matter. Warsame is going to jail for life and those so disposed to believe that holding a civilian trial for enemy combatants will meet with the approval of the world - or at least liberals in Europe - will no doubt feel better about themselves.

Asking if it is the best course for protecting ourselves doesn’t seem to enter into their heads.