Obama lacks American values

J. Michael Sharman
Published: September 8, 2008

Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, Mark J. Penn, pinpointed Sen. Obama’s biggest weakness: “His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.” 

A willingness to fight America’s enemies and support our own troops are two of those core American values which Obama lacks.

Nearly 600 captured al- Qaida and Taliban combatants are being detained at Guantanamo Bay, but Obama has said, “Now, what we need to do is we need to close Guantanamo. We need to send a strong signal that we are going to talk directly to not just our friends but also to our enemies.” 

Kyndra Rotunda, the author of “Honor Bound: Inside the Guantanamo Trials,” is now a law professor, but during her three tours of duty as a JAG officer she was the legal advisor to the Guantanamo detention camp commander and served as his liason to the ICRC, the international human rights entity that oversees the treatment of prisoners of war.

The detainees, she reports, are given 20 minutes five times per day for prayer, but our troops who guard them have to work seven days a week and are not permitted to go to church on Sunday without a special release.

Each detainee is given a Koran, which our troops guarding them are not permitted to touch.

Prof. Rotunda said that because every detainee has this perfect hiding spot for weapons, our troops guarding them are attacked as many as eight times a night.

Barack Hussein Obama has never spoken out for the spiritual needs and physical safety of our troops in Guantanamo, but he has made many speeches demanding increased rights for the terrorist/detainees.

In fact, Obama and Biden both recently said that if elected, they would consider pursuing criminal charges against George Bush and his administration for supposed crimes against the Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Mr. Obama’s concerns for those terrorists seem peculiarly lopsided since the terrorists at Guantanamo have not been assaulted by our troops, but our troops are constantly being assaulted by them.

“I did not see any violations of the law [by our troops there],” Prof. Rotunda said. “There have been independent investigations,” she says, and “in Guantanamo Bay, they discovered three instances [of prisoner abuse] in the tens of thousands of interviews.”
In two of those three cases the “abuse” was a female prison guard sitting on a prisoner’s lap in a “sexually suggestive” manner.

It is no surprise that more than 80 civilian defense attorneys who have been representing the Guantánamo detainees have publicly endorsed Sen. Obama, as has the terrorist organization Hamas. 

Sen. Obama gave an impassioned speech in the U.S. Senate asking for heightened protection for the terrorists we are holding prisoner at Guantanamo, but no speech can be found where Obama has stood up for the rights of American soldiers like 20-year-old S/Sgt. Matt Maupin, who was taken prisoner by Iraqi insurgents near Baghdad’s airport on April 9, 2004.

The Arabic television network Al-Jazeera broadcast the terrorists’ video of Maupin speaking, then kneeling on the ground with his back to the camera and finally being shot.
Obama spoke no eloquent words, announced no plan, made no special trip overseas and called for no action when, on March 30, a tip from local Iraqis led to the discovery of S/Sgt Maupin’s remains about 12 miles from where his convoy was ambushed.

Obama was against the troop surge in Iraq, declaring “our best leverage is reducing our troop presence.”

Now Obama has admitted that the surge “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.” 

Our success in Iraq was not beyond S/Sgt. Maupin’s wildest dreams.

But then, since Maupin was fundamentally American in his thinking and his values, he knew we could do it and he gave his life to accomplish that goal.

J. Michael Sharman is an independent columnist who practices law in Culpeper. His column appears Tuesdays in the Star-Exponent.