Anti-Guantanamo activist Clive Stafford Smith says Bush missed his chance to hand the election to McCain if he had had self-professed 9/11 mastermind and Guantanamo detainee Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial during the campaign season.
I said, it was clear as day that they would charge Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the first defendant in the 2007 military commissions. KSM, as he is normally called, has boasted that he was the mastermind of 9/11. His trial could have filled the 2008 election season with pictures of that terrible crime, reminding the voters to be afraid and vote Republican.
But this is not what the Administration chose to do. Rather, for their first three candidates in commissions, the Pentagon chose two juveniles (Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad) and an alleged al Qaeda chauffeur (Salim Hamdan). It was inexplicable, akin to skipping over Herman Goering for the first trial at Nuremburg, and choosing a member of the Hitler Youth.
The Bush Administration marched to the beat of its own bizarre drummer, from one misjudgment to the next. (New York Post )
