Opening Show Trial Out-of-Town
By John Batchelor on January 31, 2010 at 4:48 PM in Current Affairs
KSM.
The sharp sea-change is not only that POTUS and Attorney General Eric Holder have climbed down from their presumptive and unilateral idea to stage the KSM show trial in Manhattan, not only that the Obama administration does not have a location picked out before it climbed down, not only that we now learn that neither Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Governor David Paterson were not consulted or polled before the Obama/Holder decision was announced — but also that the Obama administration is now going hat-in-hand to the Congress for money to stage the trial at another undecided location.
Perhaps Governor’s Island or West Point (below)? Do POTUS or Holder know about Governor’s Island? It is in Manhattan Harbor. How does moving the trial to Governor’s Island decrease the possibility of a terror attack on New York while the show trial continues for months? West Point is better — a military reservation — but it invites trouble along the Hudson RIver Valley, which is most burdensome to small towns and isolated and expensive real estate.
Collins Growls.
In a bad road sign for the struggling Obama administration and its troubled Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano, the soft-spoken GOP moderate Susan Collins of Maine fell in line with the GOP’s soft-on-terror attack line when she growled that the handling of Abdulmutallab on Flight 253 has been dangerously inadequate and inept. When POTUS said ” systemic failure,” he was understating. Collins pronounced on a Saturday radio show, “Less than one hour. That’s right, less than one hour. In fact, just 50 minutes. That’s the amount of time that the FBI spent questioning Abdulmutallab, the foreign terrorist who tried to blow up a plane on Christmas Day. How did the Obama administration decide to treat a foreign terrorist, who had tried to murder hundreds of people, as if he were a common criminal?”
Falling.
The failure of the KSM show-trial staging, the lingering and deepening questions about Abdulmutallab, the general sense of confusion and retreat in Afghanistan and Iraq, the aggression by China with regard cybertheft and Taiwan, all these are building to a crescendo. The Obama team still have good will from the public. But they are acting defensively and that often invites the worst case scenario. What is worst case? Unknown.
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