President Barack Obama has adopted a stance on terrorist detainees strikingly similar to the one promoted by his predecessor in the White House.
The Wall Street Journal calls it "Bush's Gitmo Vindication" in an opinion piece published on Friday.
Referring to Obama's Thursday speech on prosecuting the war on terror, The Journal observed: "As rhetoric, his remarks were at pains to declare a bold new moral direction. On substance, however, the speech and other events this week look more like a vindication of the past seven years."
Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, discussing Obama's plan to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, said recently: "We spend hundreds of millions of dollars building this appropriate facility with all security precautions in Guantanamo to try these cases. There are cases against international law."
The Journal noted: "That was the Bush administration's point all along."
In his speech, Obama declared that the assertion detainees could not be held securely in U.S. prisons was "not rational."
Yet "for all his attacks on the Bush administration, which he accused of making 'decisions based upon fear rather than foresight,' Mr. Obama stuck with his predecessor's support for military commissions, adding some procedural bells and whistles as political cover to justify his past opposition," the Journal reported.
"Both the left and right, from the ACLU to Dick Cheney, now agree that the president has all but embraced the Bush policy."
The case of al-Qaida sleeper Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri points to the difficulty of trying terrorist suspects in civilian courts, the editorial states.
Al-Marri was arrested in December 2001, three months after entering the U.S. on a student visa. He was shortly thereafter declared an "enemy combatant" and taken into military custody. But the "enemy combatant" designation was dropped when he was indicted by a federal grand jury in Illinois.
Last month he pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and could receive a sentence of less than 15 years in a civilian prison.
"What the al-Marri prosecution — and the soft plea bargain — really shows," The Journal states, "is how hard it is to convict terrorists in civilian courts when much of the evidence against them is either classified or wasn't gathered on the battlefield at the time of capture."
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