Victor Davis Hanson: Holder’s Hypocrisy
[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.]
Attorney General Eric Holder has developed a bad habit of accusing others of acting in bad faith while doing so himself.
Take the issue of Guantanamo Bay. In Aspen, Colo., last week, Holder accused Congress of playing politics by preventing President Obama from closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center — as Obama had serially promised to do within a year of his inauguration.
But this accusation is disingenuous for a variety of reasons.
Obama campaigned on calls to reverse the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism protocols, charging that they were either unnecessary or counterproductive. Then, when invested with the responsibility of governance,Obama suddenly reversed himself on almost all of them — tribunals, renditions, Iraq, the Patriot Act, targeted airborne assassinations, and Guantanamo Bay.Holder himself — in the quite different political climate of 2002 — once supported the detention of terrorists without regard for the Geneva Conventions. What made him so radically change his views?
In fact, any time Obama wishes to close Guantanamo Bay, he can simply carry out his earlier executive order, in the same manner in which President Bush opened it without congressional approval. In blaming Congress,Holder does not mention the real reason why the president broke his promise: The American public now wants unrepentant terrorists to stay in Guantanamo rather than be incarcerated and tried in civilian courts here at home....
Read entire article at National Review
Attorney General Eric Holder has developed a bad habit of accusing others of acting in bad faith while doing so himself.
Take the issue of Guantanamo Bay. In Aspen, Colo., last week, Holder accused Congress of playing politics by preventing President Obama from closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center — as Obama had serially promised to do within a year of his inauguration.
But this accusation is disingenuous for a variety of reasons.
Obama campaigned on calls to reverse the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism protocols, charging that they were either unnecessary or counterproductive. Then, when invested with the responsibility of governance,Obama suddenly reversed himself on almost all of them — tribunals, renditions, Iraq, the Patriot Act, targeted airborne assassinations, and Guantanamo Bay.Holder himself — in the quite different political climate of 2002 — once supported the detention of terrorists without regard for the Geneva Conventions. What made him so radically change his views?
In fact, any time Obama wishes to close Guantanamo Bay, he can simply carry out his earlier executive order, in the same manner in which President Bush opened it without congressional approval. In blaming Congress,Holder does not mention the real reason why the president broke his promise: The American public now wants unrepentant terrorists to stay in Guantanamo rather than be incarcerated and tried in civilian courts here at home....