McCain's terror errors

McCain used to champion a common-sense, values-based approach to terrorism. Now he's criticizing Obama for doing the same thing.
Rosa Brooks
LA Times

June 19, 2008

No one wants to be the first candidate to invoke Sept. 11. As a campaign tactic, 9/11 chest-thumping has become both predictable and tacky. So this week, John McCain's campaign hit on a creative solution: Invoke Sept. 10.

Sept. 10? Yup. Barack Obama has "a Sept. 10 mind-set," McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann informed reporters Tuesday. The idea, as Scheunemann explained for those too thick to grasp the implied insult, is that a "naive" Obama just doesn't get it about terrorism.

Obama's offense? He praised the U.S. Supreme Court's June 12 decision that Guantanamo prisoners, detained for years without charge or trial, should be able to ask federal courts to rule on their continued detention.

McCain's surrogates were quick to seize the opportunity: Obama thinks that courts are the way to keep America safe! He "ignores that we are in a war against terrorism," opined former CIA Director R. James Woolsey. The McCain campaign even dredged up Rudy Giuliani, who lamented that Obama was "more concerned about the rights of terrorists ... than the rights that the American people have to safety and security."

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