How to use Rudy Giuliani effectively:
The McCain camp, sensing an opening, has deployed Rudy Giuliani to turn up the the heat on Barack Obama’s praise of the Supreme Court’s case granting Guantanamo detainees habeas corpus rights and praising the 1993 trial of the world trade center bombing as the model for handling these prisoners.
Giuliani and McCain advisor Randy Scheunemann held a conference call this morning to continue the debate. The Mayor stressed repeatedly that it was a “very, very important” debate and this emphasizes his frequently made point during his campaign that Obama is on “defense” and McCain on “offense.” He said that this is not the politics of “fear,” but the “politics of reality.” He explained that Obama’s advisors’ comments that Osama bin Laden would deserve habeas corpus rights is “startling.”
Tracking down and punishing terrorists after the fact is good, but it doesn’t protect our national security. The point is to get them before they do their dirty deeds.
Philip Klein, writing at the American Spectator, cites the 9/11 Commission’s findings on this matter:
But even allowing for the successes of law enforcement officials in bringing Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Ramzi Yousef to justice for their role in the 1993 bombing, the 9/11 Commission Report was crystal clear about the limits of the old strategy.
“An unfortunate consequence of this superb investigative and prosecutorial effort was that it created an impression that the law enforcement system was well-equipped to cope with terrorism,” read the report.
“Neither President Clinton, his principal advisers, the Congress, nor the news media felt prompted, until later, to press the question of whether the procedures that put the Blind Sheikh and Ramzi Yousef behind bars would really protect Americans against the new virus of which these individuals were just the first symptoms.”
The prosecutions, according to the report, led to “widespread underestimation of the threat.” …
“The process was meant, by its nature, to mark for the public the events as finished — case solved, justice done,” the investigation concluded. “It was not designed to ask if the events might be harbingers of worse to come.”
More on this from the New York Sun’s Eli Lake.
Here’s what I think: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
