TAYLOR, Mich. — The campaigns of Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama engaged Tuesday in a heated exchange over the rights of terrorism suspects, with each side accusing the other of embracing a policy that would put the country at risk of more attacks in the future.
In a Tuesday morning conference call, McCain advisers blasted Obama as “naive” and “delusional” in his approach to the handling of terrorism suspects after he expressed support for last week’s Supreme Court decision granting detainees the right to seek habeas corpus hearings. Obama hit back, saying the Republicans who had led failed efforts to capture Osama bin Laden lacked the standing to criticize him on the issue.
The exchange marked the general election’s first real engagement over the campaign against terrorism.
McCain’s aides seized, in particular, on remarks Obama made during a Monday interview with ABC News in which he praised the handling of the prosecution and conviction of the 1993 World Trade Center attackers. He called it proof that the existing justice system can handle terrorism cases.
“He’s advocating a policy of delusion,” Randy Scheunemann, a McCain adviser, said of Obama. Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey Jr. said Obama’s attitude “ignores that we are in a war against terrorism.”
Scheunemann described Obama as having the “perfect manifestation of a Sept. 10 mind-set,” saying he “does not understand the nature of the enemy as we face it.”
Separately, the McCain campaign circulated a statement by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani that said: “Barack Obama appears to believe that terrorists should be treated like criminals — a belief that underscores his fundamental lack of judgment regarding our national security.”
Obama did not back away.
“Let’s think about this: These are the same guys who helped engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11,” Obama told reporters.
He said his statements about Guantanamo were intended to suggest that suspects have a right to be heard, not freed, and accused McCain, R-Ariz., of playing political games on national security.
“What they’re trying to do is what they’ve done every election cycle, which is to use terrorism as a club to make the American people afraid,” said Obama, D-Ill.
The debate over whether to treat terrorism primarily as a law enforcement issue or as a military issue goes back years — some experts argue that it is inadequate to prosecute suicidal Islamic extremists as if they were typical criminals, while other experts say that doing so is precisely what will puncture the aura of “holy warriors” that the terrorists feed on and deglamorize them in the eyes of other Muslims.
