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Obama, McCain Heat Up Debate On Terrorism

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The New York Times

Published: June 18, 2008

A furious debate over terrorism, security and the rule of law broke out Tuesday as the presidential campaigns of Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama exchanged pointed salvoes over who could best keep the nation safe.

The latest eruption began when McCain's top foreign policy and national security adviser, Randy Scheunemann, said in a conference call with reporters that Obama was displaying a "Sept. 10 mindset" about how best to fight terrorism - a comment that echoed President Bush's attacks on Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 campaign.

Obama brushed off the criticism and questioned the McCain campaign's standing to debate anti-terrorism 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 Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their detention in federal court. Obama praised the court's decision as a return to the rule of law, while McCain excoriated it, saying that it could make America less safe, although the Republican candidate's comments were a reminder of the complexities of his own past positioning on Guantanamo detainees.

The latest battle began when McCain's advisers held a conference call to attack Obama for comments he made in an interview with ABC News, in which he said 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 the United States had been able to arrest, try and jail the culprits in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

"And, you know, let's take the example of Guantanamo," Obama said. "What we know is that, in previous terrorist attacks - for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center - we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial."

The McCain campaign asserted that Obama wanted to go back to treating terrorism as nothing more than a criminal matter, called him naive, and argued that the World Trade Center case was an example of how insufficient that was.

Obama asserted that the McCain campaign was using fear as a political weapon.

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