"Human rights" lawyers for suspected terrorists used to have a very receptive media to publicize their claims. Every suspect held at Guantanamo in Cuba or at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan or once-secret CIA sites in Europe was presumed innocent and dreadfully wronged and tortured by the Bush administration. Every prisoner held without a speedy trial was a deep black gash on America's international reputation.
But terror suspects immediately lost their cachet once Barack Obama was elected. Their political usefulness in painting Bush and Cheney as oppressors of the innocent became obsolete. Now, Obama can hold terror suspects on ships for months at a time and the networks yawn.
Just recently, on July 6, the story broke that Team Obama had held Somali terror suspect Ahmed Warsame on a Navy ship in the Persian Gulf for two months while he was interrogated. Does anyone recall those allegedly objective, nonpartisan journalists unleashing outrage by the barrel about the floating “gulag”? Did anyone hear the rustle of one press release decrying the authoritarian ways of Barack Obama from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International?
Both groups did issue releases, but both groups bored the media. They were eager to split the difference with Obama. Lawyers for terror suspects in the Bush years naturally moved right into Obama's Justice Department, so now the outrage is much more restrained. Amnesty’s press release headline was “Amnesty International Welcomes Obama's Decision to Hold Civilian Trial for Somali Terrorism Suspect, but Very Concerned about Detention Aboard Ship.” Overall, the TV networks could not even manage the “very concerned about detention” part. They yawned.
This story broke as a page 1 story in The Washington Post and New York Times and Los Angeles Times, but somehow it didn’t translate to TV. ABC’s “Good Morning America” offered a brief 97-word story from news anchor Josh Elliott. That’s 33 words more than the 64 words on
CBS’s “The Early Show.” NBC News apparently skipped reading newspapers that day – they offered nothing.
CBS anchor Jeff Glor sounded like an Obama press secretary: “An accused terrorist was very quietly taken to New York to stand trial in a civilian court. Ahmed Abdul Qader Warsame was captured in April in the Persian Gulf region, then questioned aboard a U.S. warship, it turns out, for two months. Military officials say he provided valuable intelligence about al-Qaeda operations in Yemen and Somalia. And now he's here in New York.”
The harshest critique from the Big Three was this bland sentence from ABC’s Elliott: “The case will likely stir more debate in Washington over whether military detainees should be brought into the U.S.”
Even MSNBC was almost silent in prime time. Rachel Maddow was the only evening host on the “progressive” network to cover the Warsame story and protest that the alleged terrorist was questioned before he was read Miranda warnings. Maddow concluded: “And thus, we are
unnoticed, that the map of where we think our country’s prisons might be must include all the oceans, anywhere in the world.”
Even some national newspapers yawned. USA Today gave it just 96 words on July 6.
The staff editorials that followed were mostly positive. The Los Angeles Times was positive with an editorial titled “How to treat a terror suspect.” The Post called it “a successful operation that yielded valuable intelligence and actionable law enforcement information, all while providing Mr. Warsame with the protections required by international law.” Only the New York Times stayed to the hard left, blaming Obama for “drifting toward establishing his own system of extralegal detention and tainted questioning. It is time to stop that drift and return to a constitutional system of law enforcement.”
The media didn’t ask some elementary questions that former Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen raised in an editorial for The Washington Post. The Post news staff reported Warsame was "the first foreign terrorism suspect captured by the administration outside the United States and moved to this country for trial."
It came a week after the country’s top special operations commander, Vice Admiral William McRaven, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Obama administration has no clear plan for handling captured terrorist leaders if they are caught alive outside the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. McRaven testified that "in many cases" secretly captured suspects are taken to a U.S. Navy ship -- and if they cannot be tried in a U.S. court or transferred to the custody of an allied country, "then we will release that individual."
The obvious question: If Warsame is the first suspect to be transferred to the U.S. for trial, what happened to the others implied in the phrase “in many cases”? How many terror suspects have been released? We’ll never know if we rely on the Obama-polishing media to be inquisitive on our behalf -- at least until it's too late.
