Obama, cop-killers and the cops

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn aren’t Barack Obama’s only terrorism problem.

A group of lawyers suing the United States to extend constitutional rights to enemy combatants detained in Guantanamo has endorsed Obama. Even more, the signatories say they “have been working closely with Senator Obama.”

As if that isn’t bad enough, one of the signatories who claims to have worked with Obama is head of a notorious legal activist group that has spent decades defending convicted terrorists and cop-killers.

I wonder what the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) has to say about that since its September endorsement of Obama. NAPO says it represents “more than 2,000 police unions and associations” and “241,000 sworn law enforcement officers.”

But the lawyers for the enemy combatants, terrorists and cop-killers endorsed Obama first. On January 28, 2008, “Habeas Lawyers for Obama,” a group that describes itself as “deeply involved in the Guantanamo litigation” on behalf of enemy combatants, wrote a letter advocating Obama’s candidacy. “We have worked closely with Senator Obama,” the group said, calling habeas corpus under threat because of the treatment of the enemy combatants our troops captured in the war on terrorism.

Obama bought the line and acted. “Some politicians are all talk and no action,” the group said. “But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue. When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration’s efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction,” according to the lawyers. Not only that, but Obama made his taxpayer-funded office available for their use: “When we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration’s bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us.”

Obama made the enemy combatants’ defense his personal cause, the lawyers said: “Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo.”

“Senator Obama demonstrated real leadership then and since, continuing to raise Guantanamo and habeas corpus in his speeches and in the debates,” they said.

One of the signatories was the lawyer who successfully argued the Supreme Court case giving constitutional protections to the enemy combatants. That lawyer, Michael Ratner, heads a legal activist group called the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which masquerades as a human rights organization. The CCR has publicly supported or otherwise defended the murderers of American law enforcement officers, including FBI Special Agents Jack Coler and Ronald Williams; Fulton County, Georgia, Deputy Sheriff Ricky Kinchen; New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster; Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner and NYPD Officer John Scarangella.

The CCR has been supporting terrorists, almost nonstop, since the late extremist legal activist William Kunstler founded the group when Obama was about eight years old.

Kunstler vowed to keep the revolutionaries in the streets by using the legal system as a weapon against American society. The CCR defended the Weather Underground of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn back then. Subsequently it supported the terrorists who planted more than 100 bombs across Chicago and New York, as well as the terrorist group that blew up the historic Fraunces Tavern, killing four and wounding 54, and the bomber of a New York synagogue. Later, under Ratner’s leadership, it extended its support to Islamist extremists, including the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and enemy combatants held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo.

While working with Obama, Ratner and his group teamed with a lawyer for an identified Al Qaeda front in a separate legal case.

Ratner says his work, part of decades of legal maneuvers to undermine the nation’s protection against terrorists, is really a fight to save habeas corpus and the U.S. Constitution. Assisting the enemy combatants – today, not when Obama was eight – is what brought Ratner publicly to support the Illinois senator for president.

It looks like NAPO didn’t do its detective work. “NAPO believes that Senators Obama and [Joseph] Biden will make giving our nation’s law enforcement officers every protection they need a top priority of their administration,” said association President Tom Nee in NAPO’s September endorsement.

Had NAPO done some basic gumshoe work, it might have pressured Obama, in exchange for its coveted endorsement, to disclaim his support from Ratner and other defenders of terrorism.

But it didn’t. And so far, nobody has held Obama accountable. The questions now are, how can Obama claim to be a friend of the police while he collaborates with lawyers who aid terrorists and cop-killers? What was the extent of his involvement with them? And why has he not renounced their support?

J. Michael Waller is Vice President for Information Operations at the Center for Security Policy.