After all the political sturm und drang stretching back, the White House tells us that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is getting a military tribunal trial after all.
Beyond the fact that Senator Obama voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and Candidate Obama criticized the commission system as "flawed" and "failed" (he routinely described it as such throughout the 2008 campaign), we are left with the uncomfortable irony that this move comes on the same day that now-President Obama announced his re-election campaign. Needless to say, this was an item of some note on the far left blogs today, and the words they used were hardly kind.
Let's consider for a moment how foolish it was to have this debate at all. From the beginning, the idea of civilian court trials for those detained at Gitmo was a disastrous and dangerous idea, opening them up to the ability to claim a whole host of rights under the protections of American law, bequeathed by a Constitution they sought to destroy, not as soldiers on the battlefield, but terrorists in hiding, slaughtering innocent citizens city streets. Obama's argument in 2008 that his alternate method would work seemed based more on a professorial - one might even say fantastical - view of how lawyers behave in court.
As NPR's Frank James notes, Obama's promise in 2007 was as clear-cut as it gets:
I have faith in America's courts, and I have faith in our JAGs. As President, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists.
Yet as with so many other policies upheld before taking office, this one proved just too difficult for the president to employ. The shame is that it took them so long to recognize it - more than 500 days, in fact. Now that it's done, expect Obama to say as little about this as possible, and sweep one more way he's essentially adopted the Bush approach as his own under the rug.
He may succeed in this aim. Without a realistic and vocal opponent on the issue in his own party (beyond Dennis Kucinich), and with Republicans essentially lauding the president's view, I wouldn't expect him to be confronted on the matter until next year's debates, at the earliest. I will be interested in what he has to say about the decision then - and I await John Yoo's victory lap.
