I didn’t watch, but reportedly Newt dismantled Dick Durbin on Meet the Press yesterday on the subject of the disingenuity (if not outright mendacity) of the Obama administration claims to be breaking from the Bush administration on military commissions and Guantanamo. Andy McCarthy makes him into rubble today.
2. Durbin’s “right of counsel” claim is a joke — and one you’d think Democrats would be too embarrassed to keep repeating given the number of Obama administration lawyers who, along with their former firms, spent the last eight years volunteering their services to America’s enemies. Under the Bush commission system, the terrorists already had U.S. taxpayer-funded military lawyers and were, in addition, permitted to retain private counsel — and there was no shortage of American private lawyers (such as several at Attorney General Eric Holder’s firm) who have taken up these cases. If there’s anything these terrorists have gotten plenty of, it’s top-flight legal representation.
3. The claim that “in seven years in Guantanamo there were exactly three [detainees] who were convicted by military commissions” is another screamer. The main reason for delay in the commissions process has been the aforementioned legion of volunteer American defense attorneys who ground the system to a halt by various court challenges. At the end of this legal barrage, the only real change in the commissions was a formal one — they are now authorized by Congress rather than by presidential directive (as Bush, like FDR, had used). As a practical matter (and Obama is all about being practical, right?), they operate exactly the same way. Moreover, the current delay — now in its fifth month, with several more months to go — is because President Obama himself stopped the pending commissions against 21 terrorists (when trial was imminent in several of them) so he could first “study” them and, now, propose these illusory “changes.
There’s a lot more. These people must think that we’re as stupid as they are.
Neurotic. Paranoid. False to fact and false to reason. Forever self-rationalizing. His inner rage at his own impotence and failure dripping from every word and as irrational, as separated from the real world, as dishonest, as insane, as any terrorist.
The amazing thing about Ben Affleck’s spoof of him on Saturday Night Live was that it was so close to reality. He must write this drivel himself. I can’t imagine any self-respecting network writer coming up such over-the-top lunacy.
Michael Totten says to brace for a Hezbollah electoral victory:
Geopolitically though, everything will change. Lebanon’s current “March 14″ government is an ally of the West and of Arab governments other than Syria’s. Prime Minister Fouad Seniora has repeatedly – and I think honestly – stated he wants a renewed armistice agreement with Israel. A “March 8″ government would reverse all those diplomatic efforts and push Lebanon back into, or at the very least toward, the Syria-Iran axis. War prospects with Israel would increase, and any eventual war would almost certainly turn out more destructive than the last one if the people of Lebanon willingly elect a coalition led by a jihadist party vowing war and destruction.
If it happens, this will be a major policy challenge for the new administration.
A man saying he was doing research for the U.S. government called with a few polite, pointed questions: How did she build that lab? Did she know other people creating new life forms at home?
The caller said the agency he represented is “used to thinking about rogue states and threats from that,” recalls Ms. Aull, a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate.