Campaigns in a Skirmish Over Terrorism and Law

[DeepModem Mom]

Source: New York Times

By MICHAEL COOPER
Published: June 18, 2008

A sharp debate over terrorism, security and the rule of law broke out on Tuesday as the campaigns of Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama exchanged pointed salvos over who could best keep the nation safe. The latest exchange began when Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy and national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, said in a conference call with reporters that Mr. Obama was displaying a “Sept. 10 mindset” about how best to fight terrorism — a comment that echoed President Bush’s attacks on Senator John Kerry during the 2004 election.

Mr. Obama brushed off the criticism aboard his campaign plane, and questioned the McCain campaign’s standing to debate antiterrorism policy. “These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could’ve pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,” he said.

It was the most heated back-and-forth yet in a debate that began last week when the Supreme Court ruled that the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their detention in federal court. Mr. Obama praised the court’s decision as a return to the rule of law, while Mr. McCain excoriated it, saying that it could make the nation less safe, although the Republican candidate’s comments were a reminder of the complexities of his own past positioning on Guantánamo detainees.

The latest skirmish began when Mr. McCain’s advisers held a conference call to attack Mr. Obama for comments he made in an interview with ABC News in which he said that he believed that “we can track terrorists, we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within the constraints of our Constitution,” and noted that the United States had been able to arrest, try and jail the culprits in the first World Trade Center bombing....

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/us/politics/18mccain.html?_r=1&oref=slogin