McCain Camp Blasts Obama's Foreign Policy
From CBS News' John Bentley and Allison O'Keefe:
SAN ANTONIO, TEX. – In a scathing rebuttal to remarks Barack Obama made about granting prisoners at Guantanamo Bay habeas corpus rights, John McCain's top foreign policy advisers called Obama's ideas a "policy of delusion" that are a "perfect manifestation of a September 10th mindset."
"Barack Obama's belief that we should treat terrorists as nothing more than common criminals demonstrates a stunning and alarming misunderstanding of the threat we face from radical Islamic extremism," said McCain's Director of Foreign Policy, Randy Scheunemann.
Obama said yesterday he supported criminal trials, as opposed to military tribunals, for captured terrorists. "In previous terrorist attacks -- for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial," Obama said. "They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated. And the fact that the administration has not tried to do that has created a situation where not only have we never actually put many of these folks on trial, but we have destroyed our credibility when it comes to rule of law all around the world, and given a huge boost to terrorist recruitment in countries that say, 'Look, this is how the United States treats Muslims.'"
But former CIA director and McCain adviser James Woolsey called the trials of the terrorists responsible for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center "a miserable failure" because the criminal trials withheld pertinent information from the government. "What Sen. Obama said that this is the right approach - the way we went about it in the '93 bombing was the correct approach - shows a very deep first ignorance of the fact and very, very dangerous policy," added former Navy secretary John Lehman, another McCain adviser.