Obama's lawfare team with a conflict of interest

National Review Online Editorial:

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... it was strange to hear President Obama on Thursday, castigating the military-commission system that he has chosen to revive with only cosmetic changes. It is true, as the president points out, that the commission system has convicted only three terrorists of war crimes, but this is in no small part because the trials have been endlessly delayed by legal maneuvering from some of the very lawyers who now hold important positions in Obama’s administration. Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, for example, represented Osama bin Laden’s confidant Salim Hamdan in the Supreme Court case that derailed the commissions until Congress reversed the Court. Harold Koh, the attorney Obama has nominated to be State Department legal adviser, filed an amicus brief in behalf of the detainees in the same case. Attorney General Eric Holder’s old firm has represented at least 18 enemy combatants. Because of the thick web of relationships between terrorism suspects, Holder, and other like-minded lawyers he has recruited, the Justice Department has been forced to set up elaborate protocols for recusing prosecutors, including the attorney general himself, from various national-security cases.

And it was President Obama himself who delayed commissions for 21 terrorists back in January — some of whose trials were imminent. But instead of reinstating those proceedings, the president is delaying them still further, while his administration makes trivial procedural tweaks that will allow him to pretend his policies constitute a real departure from those of his predecessor.

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There has been a great deal of bad faith in the opposition to the commissions. There is also overwrought angst over so called "indefinite detention." You hear the human rights wackos talking about the fact that many of the detainees have never been charged. The answer to that should be so what? That is true of most captives during a war. They are released at the end of the war. We should not be making this one more complicated than it needs to be.

Perhaps, Obama and his justice department would do better if they had more lawyers who supported the laws they are supposed to be enforcing.