Passed to a friendly reporter at the Washington Post late on a Friday afternoon is news that President Obama will continue the system of military commissions he railed against as a candidate. The administration will make a few minor tweaks, but as Andy McCarthy points out at the Corner in a post eviscerating the Post for its credulous analysis of the move, these commissions are "in every material way, exactly the same as the Bush Commissions: they will allow the trial of terrorism suspects in a setting that favors the government and protects classified information, and they will be criticized - perhaps not quite as sharply, but sharply - by the same hard Lefties that Obama and Holder were courting during the campaign." In order to appreciate the true scope of this latest reversal, one needs to read McCarthy in full. A sample:
And the bit about granting detainees "greater freedom to choose their attorneys" made me laugh so much my sides still ache - American lawyers lined up from here to Gitmo to take up the cause of America's enemies, including many from firms connected to Obama administration lawyers (including Attorney General Holder, whose firm has represented - according to its website - some 18 enemy combatants). [Washington Post reporter] Finn mentions none of this.... The Obama campaign slandered the commissions, just like it slandered Gitmo, military detention, coercive interrogations, the state secrets doctrine, extraordinary rendition, and aggressive national-security surveillance. Gitmo is still open (and Obama and Holder now admit it's a first-rate facility), we are still detaining captives (except when Obama releases dangerous terrorists), the Obama Justice Department has endorsed the Bush legal analysis of torture law in federal court, and Obama has endorsed state secrets, extraordinary rendition, and national-security surveillance (and the Bush stance on surveillance has since been reaffirmed by the federal court created to rule on such issues). Do these people ever get called on their hypocrisy?