The media have already begun cranking up coverage of this weekend’s fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. That event marked the first serious deterioration of public support for George W. Bush, ush, although New Orleans’ Ray Nagin was the mayor who failed his city and left his population stranded while school buses went unused. The media made sure Bush got the blame, and a year later, combined with increasing sectarian violence in Iraq and a handful of House corruption scandals (some since dismissed), that would hand the Democrats control of Congress. The retrospective is the media’s way of celebrating their victory.
We should not forget we’re also closing in on another anniversary: it has been nearly 10 years since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. Terrorists blew a hole in the side of the ship and killed 17 sailors just off the coast of Aden, Yemen, on October 12, 2000. One of the “alleged” bombers, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, has been in U.S. custody since 2002. But the Obama administration just announced it is once again dropping all charges against him.
Eric Holder’s Justice Department wrote in a brief, “no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future.” This is the second time the Obama administration has stopped al-Nashiri’s trial, halting a Guantanamo Bay hearing shortly after Obama came to power in February 2009.
The trial seemed to be moving along last November — more than nine years after the bombing and seven years after the suspect’s capture — when Holder testified “the Cole bombing…was an attack on a United States warship, and that, I think, is appropriately placed into the military commission setting.”
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