It’s a fair question from a man who lost his son on 9/11:
The Obama administration decided to trash the detainee policies of its predecessor before the inauguration — and before they’d even looked at the case files of the detainees being held at Gitmo. But when Obama came into office and signed the executive order setting a January 2010 deadline for closing Gitmo, detainee policy was placed under the purview of Obama’s White House counsel Greg Craig. That is, detainee policy was to be set by the White House, not the Department of Justice. Now Craig is gone and all of a sudden the American people are to understand that these decisions need to be made independently of the White House, by an attorney general who isn’t even asked to bounce his new policies off the president before announcing them to the public. Beamer wants to know why Obama has shirked a decision with obvious implications for U.S. national security. There is no precedent that demands the president maintain distance from this process, and, of course, the administration had, for most of the last year, run this process out of the West Wing. Ultimately, Obama will be held responsible for whatever fallout comes from this decision — from the spectacle of KSM berating the American people and calling for ever more jihad from his stand in federal court to the legal ramifications of giving full due process rights to terrorists picked up on foreign battlefields — whether he was in the room or not. So why wasn’t he in the room? Obama has plenty of time for golf, failed Olympic bids, fundraisers, dozens of meetings on Afghanistan in which no decision is made, and apology tours on three seperate continents. Was Obama too busy even to vote ‘present’ on one of the most important national security decisions of his presidency?
