The new McCain

No one wants to be the first candidate to invoke Sept. 11. As a campaign tactic, 9/11 chest-thumping has become both...

No one wants to be the first candidate to invoke Sept. 11. As a campaign tactic, 9/11 chest-thumping has become both predictable and tacky. So this week, John McCain8217;s campaign hit on a creative solution: Invoke Sept. 10.

Sept. 10? Yup. Barack Obama has 8220;a Sept. 10 mind-set,8221; McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann informed reporters Tuesday. The idea, as Scheunemann explained for those too thick to grasp the implied insult, is that a 8216;naive8217; Obama just doesn8217;t get it about terrorism.

Obama8217;s offence? He praised the US Supreme Court8217;s June 12 decision that Guantanamo prisoners, detained for years without charge or trial, should be able to ask federal courts to rule on their detention.

McCain8217;s surrogates were quick to seize the opportunity: Obama thinks that courts are the way to keep America safe! He 8220;ignores that we are in a war against terrorism,8221; opined former CIA Director R. James Woolsey. The McCain campaign even dredged up Rudy Giuliani, who lamented that Obama was 8220;more concerned about the rights of terrorists 8230; than the rights that the American people8230;8221;

Does Obama have a 8216;Sept. 108217; mind-set, whatever that is? No.

What Obama did was make a glaringly obvious point: If the Bush administration had prosecuted the captured terrorists in federal court instead of trying to put them through an error-riddled system of military commissions created on the fly, those terrorists would by now have probably been tried and convicted in fair proceedings that would have been accepted as such around the world.

Our federal courts have been in business for more than 200 years. They8217;ve tried brutal Mafia bosses who controlled entire American cities, violent drug lords, Nazis, spies and the Oklahoma City bombers. US courts have procedures for handling sensitive national security evidence, and they have already successfully tried Al Qaeda terrorists, including 8216;shoe-bomber8217; Richard Reid and 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui. These men had their day in court, made idiots of themselves, and now they8217;re locked away in a US supermax prison.

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Here8217;s the saddest thing about this week8217;s dust-up. Not too long ago 8212; before he decided that becoming the Republican presidential nominee required him to cosy up to his party8217;s most demagogic extremists and play politics with 9/11 8212; McCain was the champion of a common-sense, values-based approach to terrorism.

It was McCain who refused to sanction torture. It was McCain who said Guantanamo detainees 8220;have rights under various human rights declarations. And one of them is the right not to be detained indefinitely.8221; It was McCain who advocated moving Guantanamo detainees to Kansas8217; Ft. Leavenworth, where they would come under the certain jurisdiction of federal courts. It was McCain who insisted that we respect the basic rights even of enemies who 8220;don8217;t deserve our sympathy8221; because 8220;this isn8217;t about who they are. This is about who we are.8221; John McCain, who are you now?