The undeciders
Last Updated: 12:25 AM, November 16, 2010
Posted: November 16, 2010
It was a year ago this week that Attorney General Eric Holder first announced plans to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a New York federal court -- provoking wholly justified outrage and a swift suspension of the scheme.
The issue has been bubbling in the background ever since. Now, 12 long months later, the administration still hasn't decided what to do with KSM.
A civilian trial? A military tribunal?
Who knows?
Even last November's announcement on trying KSM in federal court came seven months after Holder first suggested such a trial was "on the table" -- which itself followed the insistence of White House officials several months earlier that it was not.
No worries, though: A decision is due, um, "soon," says Holder -- who by now must be feeling every bit as silly as he's lately been looking.
As silly as America has been looking.
Frankly, the KSM case is a metaphor for the way the Obama administration governs -- or doesn't, as the case may be.
Got a hard decision?
Punt.
It took a year and a half for President Obama to decide on what he declared was a final policy on the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan -- and that included three months of dithering over just how many troops to provide for the planned troop surge.
And even that decision apparently wasn't binding. The secretaries of state and defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were busily walking away from it just last week.
Meanwhile, it took only a few hours last week for White House senior adviser David Axelrod to do an about-face on the Bush tax cuts -- first announcing that Obama was on board with extending them for all Americans, only to reverse himself after Capitol Hill Democrats like Nancy Pelosi balked.
Also last week, Obama strolled into South Korea and sought to rewrite the free-trade pact first negotiated by President Bush in 2007 in order to accommodate the protectionism favored by the Democrats and their Big Labor allies -- and seemed startled when Seoul balked.
Is it any wonder that the rest of the world is treating the administration as some sort of sad joke?
Memo to the president: Regarding the matter of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, de cide already -- and then move on.
It's what presidents do
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