4-14-09

communi$t$' Manipulate Somalia Pirate Incident to Puff Up Obama and Get Greenwald's Proof of Obama's Flip Flop on Habeas Corpus and State Secretes Out of the Media

The communi$t$' come up with the most unbelievable scams. What offends me most is the insult of my intelligence. The Navy Seals, in my book are great, for a reason I won't mention, but the Somalia incident was very small, and the so called pirates were out of ammunition. From the beginning to the end of the Somalia incident the made for television news could have easily been planned and scripted. When one steps back and thinks about it, it is ridiculous. Was it a Walt Disney script sold to the communi$t$? Good grief. What age group is the media catering? It is fun to go to a children's movie from time to time. When did children's fantasy and world fantasy merge? The Somalia incident makes as much sense to me as 911, the DC sniper shootings, school kid shootings, bin Laden is dead, Obama as president, and so many of the events of the last nine or so years which don't add up. The Somalia incident dominated the news and knocked the rug out of a serious issue, relative to the Somalia incident, pertaining to Obama's flip flop on Habeas Corpus which Glenn Greenwald was/is doing a fantastic job of trying to bring before the public. Its my opinion the Somalia incident was a planned manipulated event for the purpose of sidetracking news away the fact Obama is anti US Constitution. Obama is showing he believes he has the right to lock people up indefinitely without them knowing what the charges are, and Obama believes people are not allowed to seek legal advice and defend themselves. Obama actions reflect a president who believes he has the power of a Dictator and he does not have to pay attention to the US Constitution.

Everyone sensed comrade Little George was going to be bad news before he took the Oath of Office. Many people sense Obama is going to be bad news. But still many people are giving Obama the benefit of the doubt and are still looking at Obama through rose colored glasses. People just don't get it. The bad guys, the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, pick the president and they pick the president to do their agenda. That's it, that's all. Nada mas. The bad guys chose Little George as president. The bad guys chose Obama to continue Little George's bad news and destruction of the US Constitution and to make war on the USA, treason. Obama is proving, which logic would agree, each president has a different style and mode of operation. Watching the differences between comrade Little George and comrade Obama style take shape is interesting, but there is not a dime's bit of difference in the agendas, because they are the Rothschild's and Rockefeller's agendas.

Proving Obama has flip flopped on Habeas Corpus, which Glenn Greenwald has done in his article which is published below, is important for two reasons. It shows Obama did not keep his promise on this most important issue which decides whether we live free. It shows Obama is a liar and logic dictates his other big promises are lies as well. So when Obama tells us the war in Iraq is over and US troops are coming home, we know he is lying to us because he is a proven liar on Habeas Corpus. When Obama says he plans to negotiate peace with Iran we know he is lying because he is a proven liar on Habeas Corpus. When Obama says he wants a nuclear free world we know he is lying because he is a proven liar on Habeas Corpus. We knew comrade Little George was lying when he moved his lips. comrade Obama lies with a different style than comrade Little George. comrade Obama is laying huge sweeping lies on the world. Obama says the entire war in Iraq is over when he knows it is not. Obama leads us to believe there is a coming peace with Iran when Obama knows otherwise. Obama says there is going to be a world without nuclear weapons when comrade Obama knows the opposite is more true. Obama is opting to tell huge lies, where comrade Little George lied when he moved his lips.

Why do presidents lie? Because presidents are placed in office by the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and the presidents are put in office to do the bad guys' agenda. The bad guy agenda is to destitute the people of the world and place the people of the world in a communi$t police state as slaves without any freedom. Only lies work in selling this agenda. This is why presidents' lie. The agenda presidents' must enact is so evil they must lie to hide the true agenda.

Also I was offended by the USA Today headline I saw Monday which was entitled something to the effect, "Easter Surprise." The article detailed, I think, I did not buy the paper and read, very speedily, what the machine allowed me to read, how US Navy Seals killed three pirates and freed the Capt. the pirates were holding hostage. Killing people on Easter is hardly something Jesus would want to the most important national news to compliment the day of remembering His Resurection. USA Today just proves what the media thinks is the important Easter message for the people is back ass backwards.

Glenn Greenwald
Saturday April 11, 2009 08:41 EDT
Obama and habeas corpus -- then and now
(updated below)

It was once the case under the Bush administration that the U.S. would abduct people from around the world, accuse them of being Terrorists, ship them to Guantanamo, and then keep them there for as long as we wanted without offering them any real due process to contest the accusations against them. That due-process-denying framework was legalized by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Many Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- claimed they were vehemently opposed to this denial of due process for detainees, and on June 12, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that the denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees was unconstitutional and that all Guantanamo detainees have the right to a full hearing in which they can contest the accusations against them.

In the wake of the Boumediene ruling, the U.S. Government wanted to preserve the power to abduct people from around the world and bring them to American prisons without having to provide them any due process. So, instead of bringing them to our Guantanamo prison camp (where, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, they were entitled to habeas hearings), the Bush administration would instead simply send them to our prison camp in Bagram, Afghanistan, and then argue that because they were flown to Bagram rather than Guantanamo, they had no rights of any kind and Boudemiene didn't apply to them. The Bush DOJ treated the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game -- fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process. Put another way, you just close Guantanamo, move it to Afghanistan, and -- presto -- all constitutional obligations disappear.

Back in February, the Obama administration shocked many civil libertarians by filing a brief in federal court that, in two sentences, declared that it embraced the most extremist Bush theory on this issue -- the Obama DOJ argued, as The New York Times's Charlie Savage put it, "that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team." Remember: these are not prisoners captured in Afghanistan on a battlefield. Many of them have nothing to do with Afghanistan and were captured far, far away from that country -- abducted from their homes and workplaces -- and then flown to Bagram to be imprisoned. Indeed, the Bagram detainees in the particular case in which the Obama DOJ filed its brief were Yemenis and Tunisians captured outside of Afghanistan (in Thailand or the UAE, for instance) and then flown to Bagram and locked away there as much as six years without any charges. That is what the Obama DOJ defended, and they argued that those individuals can be imprisoned indefinitely with no rights of any kind -- as long as they are kept in Bagram rather than Guantanamo.

Last month, a federal judge emphatically rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that the rationale of Boudemiene applies every bit as much to Bagram as it does to Guantanamo. Notably, the district judge who so ruled -- John Bates -- is an appointee of George W. Bush, a former Whitewater prosecutor, and a very pro-executive-power judge. In his decision (.pdf), Judge Bates made clear how identical are the constitutional rights of detainees flown to Guantanamo and Bagram and underscored how dangerous is the Bush/Obama claim that the President has the right to abduct people from around the world and imprison them at Bagram with no due process of any kind (click image to enlarge):

. . .

As Judge Bates noted, the prisoners shipped to Bagram actually have even fewer rights than the Guantanamo detainees did prior to Boudemiene, because at least the latter were given a sham Pentagon review (the CSRT tribunal), whereas the U.S. Government -- under both Bush and Obama -- maintain that Bagram prisoners have no rights of any kind.

In the wake of Judge Bates' ruling that foreign detainees shipped to Bagram at least have the right to a hearing to determine their guilt, what is the Obama DOJ doing? This:

The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight. . . .

Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network, which is representing the detainees, condemned the decision in a statement.

“Though he has made many promises regarding the need for our country to rejoin the world community of nations, by filing this appeal, President Obama has taken on the defense of one of the Bush administration’s unlawful policies founded on nothing more than the idea that might makes right,” she said.

In late February, I interviewed the ACLU's Jonathan Hafetz, counsel to several of the Bagram detainees, who said:

What happened was, these people were picked up in this global war on terror, were brought to Guantanamo in 2004, and once Guantanamo became subject to habeas corpus review, the administration basically, the Bush administration stopped bringing people there, and started bringing them to Bagram, and Bagram's population has shot up, and it's become in some sense the new Guantanamo. . . . And so what you have is you have a situation where the Bush administration, was free to, and the Obama administration will continue to be free to, create a prison outside the law.

The Obama DOJ is now squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions. Leave aside for the moment the issue of whether you believe that the U.S. Government should have the right to abduct people anywhere in the world, ship them to faraway prisons and hold them there indefinitely without charges or any rights at all. The Bush DOJ -- and now the Obama DOJ -- maintain the President does and should have that right, and that's an issue that has been extensively debated. It was, after all, one of the centerpieces of the Bush regime of radicalism, lawlessness and extremism.

Consider, instead, what Barack Obama -- before he became President -- repeatedly claimed to believe about these issues. The Supreme Court's Boudemiene ruling was issued at the height of the presidential campaign, and while John McCain condemned it as "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country," here is what Obama said about it in a statement he issued on the day of the ruling:

Today's Supreme Court decision ensures that we can protect our nation and bring terrorists to justice, while also protecting our core values. The Court's decision is a rejection of the Bush Administration's attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo - yet another failed policy supported by John McCain. This is an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus. Our courts have employed habeas corpus with rigor and fairness for more than two centuries, and we must continue to do so as we defend the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy.

My, what a ringing and inspiring defense of habeas corpus that was from candidate Barack Obama. So moving and eloquent and passionate. And that George W. Bush sure was an awful tyrant for trying to "create a legal black hole at Guantanamo" -- apparently, all Good People devoted to a restoration of the rule of law and the Constitution know that the place where the U.S. should "create a legal black hole" for abducted detainees is Bagram, not Guantanamo. What a fundamental difference that is.

Even worse, here is what Obama said on the floor of the Senate in September, 2006, when he argued in favor of an amendment to the Military Commissions Act that would have restored habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees. I defy anyone to read this and reconcile what he said then to what he is doing now:

The bottom line is this: Current procedures under the CSRT are such that a perfectly innocent individual could be held and could not rebut the Government's case and has no way of proving his innocence.

I would like somebody in this Chamber, somebody in this Government, to tell me why this is necessary. I do not want to hear that this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that. . . . But as a parent, I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being held and being able to prove their innocence.

This is not just an entirely fictional scenario, by the way. We have already had reports by the CIA and various generals over the last few years saying that many of the detainees at Guantanamo should not have been there. As one U.S. commander of Guantanamo told the Wall Street Journal:

"Sometimes, we just didn't get the right folks."

We all know about the recent case of the Canadian man who was suspected of terrorist connections, detained in New York, sent to Syria--through a rendition agreement--tortured, only to find out later it was all a case of mistaken identity and poor information. . . .

This is an extraordinarily difficult war we are prosecuting against terrorists. There are going to be situations in which we cast too wide a net and capture the wrong person. . . .

But what is avoidable is refusing to ever allow our legal system to correct these mistakes. By giving suspects a chance--even one chance--to challenge the terms of their detention in court, to have a judge confirm that the Government has detained the right person for the right suspicions, we could solve this problem without harming our efforts in the war on terror one bit. . . .

Most of us have been willing to make some sacrifices because we know that, in the end, it helps to make us safer. But restricting somebody's right to challenge their imprisonment indefinitely is not going to make us safer. In fact, recent evidence shows it is probably making us less safe.

In Sunday's New York Times, it was reported that previous drafts of the recently released National Intelligence Estimate, a report of 16 different Government intelligence agencies, describe "actions by the United States Government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay."

This is not just unhelpful in our fight against terror, it is unnecessary. We don't need to imprison innocent people to win this war. For people who are guilty, we have the procedures in place to lock them up. That is who we are as a people. We do things right, and we do things fair.

Two days ago, every Member of this body received a letter, signed by 35 U.S. diplomats, many of whom served under Republican Presidents. They urged us to reconsider eliminating the rights of habeas corpus from this bill, saying:

"To deny habeas corpus to our detainees can be seen as a prescription for how the captured members of our own military, diplomatic, and NGO personnel stationed abroad may be treated. ..... The Congress has every duty to insure their protection, and to avoid anything which will be taken as a justification, even by the most disturbed minds, that arbitrary arrest is the acceptable norm of the day in the relations between nations, and that judicial inquiry is an antique, trivial and dispensable luxury."

The world is watching what we do today in America. They will know what we do here today, and they will treat all of us accordingly in the future--our soldiers, our diplomats, our journalists, anybody who travels beyond these borders. I hope we remember this as we go forward. I sincerely hope we can protect what has been called the "great writ" -- a writ that has been in place in the Anglo-American legal system for over 700 years.

Mr. President, this should not be a difficult vote. I hope we pass this amendment because I think it is the only way to make sure this underlying bill preserves all the great traditions of our legal system and our way of life.

I yield the floor.

So that Barack Obama -- the one trying to convince Democrats to make him their nominee and then their President -- said that abducting people and imprisoning them without charges was (a) un-American; (b) tyrannical; (c) unnecessary to fight Terrorism; (d) a potent means for stoking anti-Americanism and fueling Terrorism; (e) a means of endangering captured American troops, Americans traveling abroad and Americans generally; and (f) a violent betrayal of core, centuries-old Western principles of justice. But today's Barack Obama, safely ensconced in the White House, fights tooth and nail to preserve his power to do exactly that.

I'm not searching for ways to criticize Obama. I wish I could be writing paeans celebrating the restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law. But these actions -- these contradictions between what he said and what he is doing, the embrace of the very powers that caused so much anger towards Bush/Cheney -- are so blatant, so transparent, so extreme, that the only way to avoid noticing them is to purposely shut your eyes as tightly as possible and resolve that you don't want to see it, or that you're so convinced of his intrinsic Goodness that you'll just believe that even when it seems like he's doing bad things, he must really be doing them for the Good. If there was any unanimous progressive consensus over the last eight years, it was that the President does not have the power to kidnap people, ship them far away, and then imprison them indefinitely in a cage without due process. Has that progressive consensus changed as of January 20, 2009? I think we're going to find out.

* * * * *

On a related note, the Columbia Journalism Review has a very interesting article tracing the origins of the "Obama/state secrets" controversy of the last week, documenting how it became a scandal, and examining which media outlets have covered it and -- more importantly -- have been ignoring it.

UPDATE: One of the things I always found so striking about debates over Bush/Cheney executive power abuses was that Bush followers who admittedly had no substantive arguments to justify those actions would nonetheless still find reasons to defend their admired leader: Bush knows more than we do and probably has secret reasons for doing it. Bush is a good person and well-motivated and there's no reason to think he's doing bad or abusive things. Rights for Terrorists pale in comparsion to other more important issues. Republican critics of Bush are hysterics and paranoids who are only criticizing him because they want to get on TV and sell books.

As of January 20, 2009, one no longer finds those claims at National Review, Weekly Standard, right-wing blogs and the like, but instead, finds them commonly expressed in Obama-defending venues and some liberal blogs. Scan the comment section to John Cole's post criticizing Obama's Bagram position to see how frequently this mindset is now expressed to justify whatever Obama does -- these are just a representative sample of actual quotes:

it seems much more plausible to me that Greenwald simply doesn’t have access to the same facts the current DOJ does;
None of us have seen the actual case files and can make informed judgments about whether revealing the relevant information in particular cases would actually pose a threat to national security. That applies equally to Greenwald, and he must know that; it makes his rant silly and intellectually dishonest;
But Obama picks his battles. You can be upset that he hasn’t chosen to make this one of them (I am too), but I’m not sure that it’s necessarily on the same plane as the economy, health care, energy independence, etc.;
look at Obama and tell us if you see a man who is interested in some kind of imperial all-powerful, unchecked presidency. what in his background, his demeanor or his other actions make you think he’s that kind of guy ? what does your gut tell you about him? he’s a power-hungry authoritarian who is seeking to grab as much power as he can ? bullshit.
I guess Glenzilla will end up on the cover of Newsweek and have an appearance on Morning Joe soon since he has now said effectively that President Obama is worse than Bush but he is just about to over play his normally spot on hand with his rhetoric;
Let’s also keep in mind here that one of Greenwald’s jobs is to get people to read his blog. It’s not like he’s doing this for Salon pro-bono.
It goes on and on like that (with a fair number of comments who disagree). My response to all of it is here. And Cole commenter Mary adds some important thoughts here.

Most amazing is that the specific comment which John cut and pasted into his post (without approving of it) actually claims that a reading of the Obama DOJ's brief (here - .pdf) somehow doesn't constitute support for Bush's position even though (a) the Obama DOJ filed a 2-sentence brief in February saying they support the Bush/Cheney position in full; (b) the principal point of the new Brief is to argue that the District Judge was wrong to reject the Bush/Cheney position that Bagram detainees have no rights of any kind; and (c) the Brief repeatedly asserts pure, defining Addington/Yoo propositions about the unchallengeable power of the President to make decisions about detainees.

To recap: Obama files a brief saying he agrees in full with the Bush/Cheney position. He's arguing that the President has the power to abduct, transport and imprison people in Bagram indefinitely with no charges of any kind. He's telling courts that they have no authority to "second-guess" his decisions when it comes to war powers. But this is all totally different than what Bush did, and anyone who says otherwise is a reckless, ill-motivated hysteric who just wants to sell books and get on TV.

-- Glenn Greenwald

http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/obama_and_state_secrets_shhh.php?page=1

Campaign Desk, Transparency — April 10, 2009 03:29 PM
Obama and State Secrets? Shhh…
Silence breaking on key legal filing

By Clint Hendler

Single Page Print Email Comments Digg Facebook Reddit StumbleUpon Delicious Obama, like Bush, decides to limit what the courts and the people can know about warrantless wiretapping. Isn’t that a big story?

Not just yet.

On April 3, the Holder Justice Department filed arguments in Jewel v. National Security Agency, a lawsuit being waged by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of five people who claim that their constitutional rights were abridged when they were subjected to the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.

While the suit was originally filed under Bush, the EFF and Justice agreed to stay the date of the Department’s filing until after the election. That would mean that a new administration would be responsible for litigating the case, one the EFF surely hoped would be more receptive, given that it looked likely that the White House would be won by a candidate whose platform decried “abuse” of the state secrets privilege, which Bush used to swat away suits related to the wiretapping program.

But on Friday, that new department sought to have the case dismissed by relying, in part, on a broad reading of a legal principle oft invoked by the Bush department, that the federal government could essentially stop legal proceedings by claiming that any litigation of the case would reveal state secrets.

This is a big deal, but so far the story has received little light outside of generally liberal leaning portions of the media.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald almost certainly deserves sole credit for advancing the story thus far, and, it should be said, for pointing out that in addition to the states secrets claim, the Obama administration advanced what he and the EFF’s lawyer in the case see as a totally novel claim. In Greenwald’s words:

…the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and — even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal — you are barred from suing them unless they “willfully disclose” to the public what they have learned.
That claim—combined with the fact that this was the first time the Obama administration advanced a broad assertion of the state secrets privilege on their own, rather than agreeing to defend such an assertion held over from Bush—would suggest that the filing was worthy of more attention than it received from traditional sources.

On Tuesday, Keith Olbermann’s Countdown did a segment on the filing that seemed to draw heavily on Greenwald’s analysis, and on Wednesday he hosted Kevin Bankston, the EFF’s counsel on the case.

Until today, the only national straight-reporting outlet to breathe a word of the story was CBS. Katie Couric, in an exclusive interview with Attorney General Holder, asked Holder several questions about his department’s plans for applying state secrets claims going forward, and for reviewing past applications made by Bush administration lawyers. But while that full exchange is available online as part of the interview’s transcript, the broadcast version doesn’t quote a word of Holder’s answers on the topic, and Couric’s narration only glancingly refers to the general complication of trying “sensitive” cases in “open court.” Wednesday’s seven-minute Evening News segment made no mention of the administration’s filing or even of the phrase “state secrets.”

In the full interview, where Couric did press on the matter, she did not ask Holder if he saw a distinction between the privilege’s pre-Bush traditional application, where it was usually used to bar or place for in camera review specific pieces of evidence that the government claimed would harm national security, as opposed to the broader application now evoked by both Bush and Obama, last Friday and in other cases, where, if the courts agree, would stop all litigation on the subject at hand. Nor did she ask about the “willful disclosure” claim.

Outside of Couric, coverage came from the San Francisco Chronicle (where the EFF is based, where the suit is being litigated, and where a telecom technician has testified that equipment enabling the program was housed), and in a 140-word squib in the New York Post.

Notably absent was any mention from The New York Times, not only as the paper of record, but as the paper that, from December 16, 2005, the day it published James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s long delayed article exposing the warrantless wiretapping program at issue in the Jewel case, has widely covered the story and its constitutional fallout.

“If the criticism is that we missed that particular filing, I’ll take that hit,” Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet told CJR. “I’m not sure why… my gut is this one just sort of slipped through.”

“I’m aware that there has been some criticism that baffles me a little bit, that the Times has not reported the criticism that the Obama administration has not been as aggressive on some national security issues as some critics wanted. I would argue pretty strenuously that we have covered that as aggressively if not more aggressively than anybody else,” said Baquet. “That’s why I’m not completely thrown or upset if we did in fact miss that filing.”

Today, ABC’s Jake Tapper chimed in with a blog post that hit the right points, which, while a step towards prominence, certainly isn’t the same as a World News segment.

But it is an indication that, as Greg Sargent, of the Washington Post-owned Plum Line put it this morning, that “This story is getting more and more attention … and will be one to watch.”

It does seem seems like the story—with Talking Points Memo, this morning, hosting a banner headline linking to five takes on the filing—may finally be about to go big.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/12/AR2009041203002_pf.html

An Early Military Victory for Obama

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 13, 2009; A09

It was one of the earliest tests of the new American president -- a small military operation off the coast of a Third World nation. But as President Bill Clinton found out in October 1993, even minor failures can have long-lasting consequences.

Clinton's efforts to land a small contingent of troops in Haiti were rebuffed, for the world to see, by a few hundred gun-toting Haitians. As the USS Harlan County retreated, so did the president's reputation.

For President Obama, last week's confrontation with Somali pirates posed similar political risks to a young commander in chief who had yet to prove himself to his generals or his public.

But the result -- a dramatic and successful rescue operation by U.S. Special Operations forces -- left Obama with an early victory that could help build confidence in his ability to direct military actions abroad.

Throughout the past four days, White House officials played down Obama's role in the hostage drama. Until yesterday, he made no public statements about the pirates.

In fact, aides said yesterday, Obama had been briefed 17 times since he returned from his trip abroad, including several times from the White House Situation Room. And without giving too many details, senior White House officials made it clear that Obama had provided the authority for the rescue.

"The president's focus was on saving and protecting the life of the captain," one adviser said. Friday evening, after a National Security Council telephone update, Obama granted U.S. forces what aides called "the authority to use appropriate force to save the life of the captain." On Saturday at 9:20 a.m., Obama went further, giving authority to an "additional set of U.S. forces to engage in potential emergency actions."

A top military official, Vice Adm. William E. Gortney, commander of the Fifth Fleet, explained that Obama issued a standing order that the military was to act if the captain's life was in immediate danger.

"Our authorities came directly from the president," he said. "And the number one authority for incidents if we were going to respond was if the captain's life was in immediate danger. And that is the situation in which our sailors acted."

After the rescue ended, White House officials immediately offered expanded information about Obama's role, though the president simply released a statement praising the troops and expressing pride in the captain's bravery.

The operation pales in scope and complexity to the wars underway in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Obama's adversaries are unlikely to be mollified by his performance in a four-day hostage drama.

Nonetheless, it may help to quell criticism leveled at Obama that he came to office as a Democratic antiwar candidate who could prove unwilling or unable to harness military might when necessary.

And as Obama's Democratic predecessors can attest, a victory -- no matter how small -- is better than a failure.

Clinton's decision to send the USS Harlan County to Haiti loaded with troops was seen as a half-measure taken by a president spooked by the earlier downing of a Black Hawk helicopter in Somalia.

After the Harlan's failure to get ashore, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote in a column that year that the incident "makes the administration look feckless and the country look weak."

Thirteen years earlier, Democratic President Jimmy Carter authorized a military rescue of the 52 hostages being held by Iranians in Tehran. The 1980 attempt, called Operation Eagle Claw, ended when two helicopters crashed in the desert, killing eight servicemen.

The incident was a permanent blemish on Carter's reputation.

Had yesterday's rescue at sea gone badly, the political damage for Obama might have been severe. But aides said the outcome should be seen as a success.

"This is the latest indication that the national security team is working well together," a senior White House official said last night. "These folks have spent a lot of time together, including with the president, in the first couple months, and they have a good working relationship. "