Reversal on 9/11 trials a big gamble for Obama

DavidRivkin.com, AFP ^ | 04/05/2011 | Mohideen Mifthah

[dont_tread_on_malik]

WASHINGTON, April 5, 2011 (AFP) - By reversing itself and deciding to prosecute the 9/11 mastermind before a military tribunal, the Obama administration risks alienating its left-wing base and irking conservatives.

A stern Attorney General Eric Holder, who had spent a year and a half seeking to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators in federal civilian court, announced Monday that the administration was giving up on the controversial bid.

Obama's team had to “face a simple truth” that the congressional restrictions against trials in the United States were “unlikely to be repealed in the immediate future,” he said.

“And we simply cannot allow a trial to be delayed any longer for the victims of the 9/11 attacks or for their family members who have waited for nearly a decade for justice.”But the bid to lay the blame at Congress's feet on the very day President Barack Obama officially declared his candidacy for a second term, raised some analysts' eyebrows.

“This is a problem of Obama's making, even though... Holder tried to blame Congress,” said Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University.

“The Obama administration is almost hypocritical in complaining about this case when the president, Obama, preserved the military tribunals.”The president vowed to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp within a year in one of his first initiatives after taking office in January 2009. But he failed to fulfill that goal as he struggled to tear down the counterterrorism framework left over from George W. Bush's administration.

[dont_tread_on_malik]

It's always too little, too late...

[La Lydia]

Is it a gamble when you have neither choice nor alternative?

[NWFLConservative]

"By reversing itself and deciding to prosecute the 9/11 mastermind before a military tribunal, the Obama administration risks alienating its left-wing base and irking conservatives."

Have I been pulling a Rumplestilskin and been asleep for the last two plus years? Has the Kenyan Con Man and his incompetent, Marxist ship of fools not been doing this since roundabout noon on Jan 20th, 2009?

Everything the Incom-POTUS and his three ring clown circus have been doing has been irking Conservatives (notice I did not say REPUBLICANS, they are quite often NOT the same things) from the day he threw his hat in the ring. This jackass has flip flopped more than any president in our history. He makes Bubba Klintoon's flip-floppery look like child's play. He has flip flopped more than IHOP's pancake poster child Rachael Corrie.

[blackdog]

Why are terrorist trials in or out of GITMO, all about Obama? Why do journalists contribute to his self absorbed singular world?

[kennedy]

Bummer. Eric Holder was counting on his show trial being televised all day for months. It was going to be bigger than the OJ Simpson trial.

[Nervous Tick]

Obama administration risks...irking conservatives

Say what? Like Erkel could have me any more irked than I have been for two years already??!?

[stylin19a]

pissing off the left as opposed to pissing off everybody if you lose at trial...like that moron Holder almost did ?

[kennedy]

Bummer. Eric Holder was counting on his show trial being televised all day for months. It was going to be bigger than the OJ Simpson trial.

[SunkenCiv]

It’s no gamble — he’s just reeled in all the centrist Demwits who had wandered away.

Thanks dont_tread_on_malik.