So Rove, sensing a new meme in the air the way a puppy smells a side of bacon, decides that after spending weeks talking about how dangerous Obama is and how he's made the country less safe that he's going to tell everyone what a great job he's doing on national security. Rove worked in the Bush administration, but he's either so ignorant about policy that he didn't realize Obama was doing the same thing as Bush these past few weeks and needed someone else to explain it to him, or he's just making everything up as he goes along. In the second paragraph of his op-ed this morning, Rove gets it wrong (emphasis mine):
For example, President Obama kept George W. Bush's military tribunals for terror detainees after calling them an "enormous failure" and a "legal black hole." His campaign claimed last summer that "court systems . . . are capable of convicting terrorists." Upon entering office, he found out they aren't.
Here's a brief list of terrorists convicted in federal court just under the Bush administration, you know, the one Rove worked for:
- Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted 2006
- Masoud Khan, convicted 2004
- Richard Reid, convicted 2003
- Iyman Faris AKA Mohammad Rauf, convicted 2003
- Jose Padilla, convicted 2007
- Five of the "Fort Dix Six", convicted 2008
Since Obama has taken office, Ali Saleh al-Marri was tried and pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism, and five of the Liberty City plotters were convicted (they plan to appeal). The alleged perpetrators of the suspected terrorist plot foiled in New York yesterday will be tried in federal court. It's one thing to argue, as Obama has, that some detainees can't be tried in federal court because they wouldn't have enough admissible evidence to convict them, it's another entirely to claim that the courts literally "can't" try terrorists. That is an absurd claim on its face. The problem isn't the nature of federal court, the problem is the state of the government's case against the detained.
-- A. Serwer
