Obama's AG Embodies BELIEFS WE CAN CHANGE

When he introduced his new national security team the other day, the team that includes prospective Attorney General Eric Holder, President-elect Obama said he values the different opinions from team members. It turns out he’d still get different opinions even if he were introducing Holder by himself.

As we noted the other day, Holder blasted the current administration in June in a speech to the American Constitution Society. The AP provides some more details on what he said:

"We must close our detention center in Guantanamo Bay," Holder told the American Constitution Society this summer. "A great nation should not detain people, military or civilian, in dark places beyond the reach of law. Guantanamo Bay is an international embarrassment."

Holder added that he never thought he'd see the day where the "Supreme Court would have to order the President of the United States to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Convention." (“Obama AG pick defended Guantanamo policy”).

But in January 2002 he said this in a CNN interview when asked

whether terrorism suspects could be held forever, Holder
responded: "It seems to me you can think of these people as combatants and we are in the middle of a war," Holder said in a CNN interview in January 2002. "And it seems to me that you could probably say, looking at precedent, that you are going to detain these people until war is over, if that is ultimately what
we wanted to do."

Just weeks later, Holder told CNN he didn't believe al-Qaida suspects qualified as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

"One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located," said Holder, the former deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration. "Under the Geneva Convention, you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people."

Holder said it was important to treat detainees humanely. But he said they "are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war." He also downplayed criticism that prisoners were being mistreated.

How to explain the difference? Probably by noting that Holder had no partisan advantage at stake in January 2002, and was giving his honest opinion, informed by common sense, his sound legal judgment, and his knowledge of history. The anti-Bush, lose-your-mind, "Close Gitmo!" bandwagon hadn’t gotten rolling yet. Once it did, the people piling on were soon ditching unneeed baggage like common sense, history, and, in the case of anti-Bush lawyers, their legal judgment.

Last June, after years of the Left brainwashing themselves about the war-crime status of detaining some of the the world's most dangerous human beings, Holder simply told the ACS what he thought they wanted to hear. He never imagined, back then, that he might face nomination as AG in an Obama administration, where he then would have to explain his two opposing points of view. (This hardly says much for his ability to hold principled positions).

Now, I expect Holder will swing back closer to the Bush position, with which his 2002 views are identical.

Craven pandering to friendly audiences during speeches at the high tide of Bush Derangement Syndrome is one thing. But when you’re boss is the President and you know he’ll be blamed for any boneheaded stunts you pull, stunts like recommending setting bloodthirsty jihadists loose on U.S. soil, you might be more likely to try getting your feet back on the ground.

This is like that joke that goes, "the older I get, the smarter my parents seem." Faced with the gravity of a struggle they minimized and ridiculed—and made worse--when they were in the opposition (disloyal opposition), the Democrats now realize their political success—even their survival—depends on not being the party that expeditiously loses the terror war on every front. What formerly they ridiculed as patently stupid because Bush wanted to do it, and he’s patently stupid, is now obvious and sensible to Democrats. That's because they’re the ones now who have to make the hard choices.

The strange thing is that common sense may actually be returning to Washington, whence it’s been banished throughout the long, universal Democrat tantrum that erupted in 2002-2003 in response to Bush’s early successes. Bush never lost his cool, but his sensible policies were sabotaged and damaged—as they were meant to be—by having to be implemented and defended in the teeth of a howling gale of insults, spittle, and treason. That’s the best idea the Dems had for beating him—the political equivalent of staving off defeat in checkers by flipping over the board and all the pieces.

Obama's Attorney General Pick

I wasn’t sure at first what to think about President-elect Obama’s selection of Eric Holder as nominee for Attorney General of the United States. Frankly, I don’t remember him from the Clinton administration. But then I read Andrew McCarthy’s take on him at The Corner, (“Opposed to Holder without apology”), ripping Holder for his role in the Clinton PardonFest. I have tremendous admiration for McCarthy, and since he speaks as a former Justice Department insider (he prosecuted the Blind Sheikh and, atypically of DOJ terror prosecutions, won), I give his opinions that much more weight.

Now I see that the Arab American News likes Holder, and for all the wrong reasons. Speaking for Osama Siblani’s newspaper is up-and-coming jihadist mouthpiece, Tarek Baydoun, whom we’ve notice before calling for, among other things, the "national unity" of the Muslim nation. Baydoun sings Holder’s praises, cementing my negative view of Holder in the process. (“Obama's Attorney General pick encouraging to Arabs, Muslims and all Americans”).

Baydoun is an example of the heights that can be reached in opinion-writing when a writer is unfettered by either fact-checking or moderation. As an Osama Siblani disciple, Baydoun subscribes, or pretends to subscribe (sorry, I instinctively credit all law students with crass ambition), to the Muslim Gulag narrative, whereby, (goes the narrative), each morning every Arabic resident of East Dearborn wakes--on a good day--to face daily checkpoints, body searches, and harsh interrogation, and--on a bad day--a simple trip to the bakery is as likely as not to end in summary arrest, deportation, waterboarding, transport to Gitmo, or disappearance without a trace.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, as a West Dearborner who has to drive through East Dearborn to get to work, I have to allow myself extra time to plod through the countless black marias blocking traffic as they round up hapless Muslims innocently on their way to wire money to their freedom-loving relatives abroad.

As Baydoun tells it, this systematic destruction of the civil liberties of Arab Americans will be the worst stigma of all of the Bush administration, above and beyond, as he so temperately describes it, “the failures on all fronts of the Bush administration.”

Baydoun is heartened that Obama picked Holder who, in June, long before he knew he was going to have to have to face Senate confirmation for Attorney General, made a speech to the American Constitution Society, “a progressive organization of lawyers and law students,” where:

Holder blasted the Bush administration's policies as "immora[l]." Holder said the policies weakened the government's position at home and abroad in its fight against terrorism. Holder described the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II and the Supreme Court decision upholding it as "one of the darkest moments in American constitutional history." He said that although the government did not do the same to American Muslims after 9/11, much of the action it did take was "excessive and unlawful." Holder said "Our government authorized the use of torture, approved secret electronic surveillance of American citizens without due process of law, and denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of enemy combatants. I do not question the motives and patriotism of those responsible in implementing these policies. But this does nothing to mitigate the fact that these steps were wrong when they were initiated, and they are wrong now… We owe the American people a reckoning."

When you write like Baydoun, who actually was allowed to publish to readers
of the Arab American News that “hundreds of citizens” have been “arbitrarily and illegally detained without trial in prisons inside and outside of the United States” [and] “transferred abroad for torture” [!], you’re not going to be able to resist the boundless nonsense of Holder’s seamless non sequitur from the Japanese internment of WWII to the current domestic war on terror: “although the government did not do the same to American Muslims after 9/11, much of the action it did take was ‘excessive and unlawful.’”

I don’t expect a Democrat President to nominate an Attorney General of my exact liking. But at least he should know the law, (especially the Constitution, e.g., the legal history of habeas corpus being extended to enemy combatants), and have a decent measure of coolness in his thinking. Based on the excerpts of the speech he gave the ACS, Holder appears to lack all of these.

Personally, in view of the incoming Obama administration's sudden discovery of the lethal intentions of our jihadist enemies, I look forward to watching Holder try to explain to the Senate Judiciary Committee how he intends to keep Americans safe from domestic terrorist plots while intending to "reverse course" on effective methods, perfectly legal methods, that have been successful these last few years to thwart terrorism. Sure, it's fun to make gratuitious swipes at the Bush administration when you don't imagine you might be part of the next administration. Now Holder can try being the AG who suggests to President Obama, whose re-election campaign started November 6th, that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deserves release under habeas corpus.