Will Media Ask Questions on Obama's Pledge To Prosecute War Criminals?

June 9th, 2008 3:22 PM

This is pretty serious stuff that the American public surely would like more details on. Can we expect the MSM to follow up on this with some questions? Probably not, but they need to.

Marc Ambinder notes how the Democratic Justice Department will be interested in making a case against senior Bush adminstration officials in the future.

Thomas Lifson reminds us of Obama’s take on this:

Barack Obama’s plan for imposing unity on the nation after he takes office apparently entails a close look at war crimes trials for Bush administration officials. He has even said so in an interview with Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News.

This kind of change — putting your predecessors on trial for their conduct of policy — may not be what most Americans really want or expect from someone with Obama’s gauzy rhetoric of unity. But unity has a dark side in the hands of people who regard their opponents as criminals. America has two centuries-plus of history lacking the totalitarian practice of jailing the predecessors when a new president takes office.

This is the sort of proposal one might expect from a man steeped in Marxism at his church, from his friends like Ayers, and as a member of the Alinsky Left. But I am surprised he let this slip.

Obama:

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to “immediately review the information that’s already there” and determine if an inquiry is warranted — but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as “a partisan witch hunt.” However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because “nobody is above the law.”

Charles Johnson takes a screen cap from Obama’s website of this PDF that also mentions this and notes:

And something tells me they don’t mean Al Qaeda.

I’m pretty sure we aren’t talking about Ramsey Clark either.  Expect to hear zip on this from the MSM.