When Obama assumed the Presidency, he promised “change.” For the most part, he gave us more — a lot more — of the same socialism and deficit spending we got under the Bush Administration.
One area in which Obama has delivered change is the way that we treat enemy combatants and prisoners captured in war. Unlike the Bush Administration, the Obama Justice Department treats captured terrorists as nothing more than common criminals. This means that even though their explicit goal is to destroy the American people and their Constitution, they are still welcome to enjoy the benefits of that very system and its laws. The same government these terrorists seek to destroy, by any violent means necessary, bends over backwards to defend their rights and even set them free. Imagine if America had done this with Nazis in World War II? There would be no America today for terrorists to attack.
Opponents of this policy are put on the defensive when they are asked, “By what right do you afford individual rights, and due process of law, to American citizens but not to anybody else?” This ridiculous question totally ignores the context. Advocates of Obama’s policies should be put on the defensive with questions like, “When a soldier is on a battlefield is it wrong for him to shoot at someone who’s clearly going to fire first? Is it wrong for one soldier to shoot another in a war?” The obvious answer, however, implies that you’re not a pacifist. The people who now inhabit America’s White House and Justice Department are pacifists when it comes to defending America. They evade the fact that events such as 9/11 and other acts of terrorism are self-evidently acts of war. Indeed, Barack Obama has even forbidden his administration to use the term “War on Terror” and refuses to refer to it as a war. Just how stupid does he think we (and the terrorists themselves) are?
The superficial rationalization for not calling ‘war’ what it obviously is goes like this: “Acts of terrorism are not launched by states or governments; they’re enacted by crazy individuals.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Our own United States Department of State, under every administration, has made public the names of the various governments around the world responsible for funding, promoting and in some cases even orchestrating acts of terror against the United States and its allies. The most notable example was Libya, a government who sponsored terrorism against America and was bombed in retaliation by President Reagan in the 1980s. Obama’s policy is based on a complete inversion and corruption of the principles Reagan (and every President other than Obama) has consistently acted upon: Simply that your enemies must be attacked and struck down for the sake of saving America and its citizens from annihilation.
Without the moral and sometimes financial support of these terrorist-sponsoring governments, of which Iran has always been near or at the top of the list, there would be little or no terrorism ever carried out. For the United States to take these terrorists, caught in battle, and try them as another criminal would be tried for murder, or even for purse snatching, is the equivalent of soldiers in World War II bringing home Nazi or Japanese soldiers and saying, “Here. I didn’t want to shoot them. Try them in criminal court, and if they’re acquitted, set them free.”
Keep in mind that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be tried in federal criminal court, thanks to the Obama Administration, was almost acquitted because of technicalities raised by lawyers. Keep in mind that the first attack on the World Trade Center, back in 1993, resulted in the capture of terrorists who were later tried as criminals, rather than as enemy combatants. You see how well that worked out eight years later.
If it’s wrong to treat war criminals as anything other than common criminals, then it must also be wrong to engage in war — even when attacked. Perhaps that’s what Obama and his supporters actually believe. Perhaps we’ll find out the next time the United States is attacked, as it will be — especially when terrorists begin to go free, as some will under Obama’s policy. The kind of “change” Obama has in mind, and is unapologetically implementing, is one in which the United States no longer defends itself, even when attacked.