In an appearance on Fox today, Dana Perino continued the attack on the Obama Administration’s handling of the attempted Christmas bombing, dismissing comparisons to the Richard Reid shoe-bombing case as “apples and oranges.”
Despite the similarities between the two cases, and despite the fact that President Bush had OKed the use of military tribunals in November 2001, a month before the shoe bombing attempt, Perino argued that the context in which the two cases unfolded were significantly different.
“One of the things the Administration has done over the past two weeks is said, ‘Well, we did with the underwear bomber exactly what the Bush Administration did with the shoe bomber.’ It’s really comparing apples and oranges,” Perino says, adding:
“[G]iven eight years of case law and experience, we would not have handled the shoe bomber the way that we did. We would have handled it in a better way.”
Here’s the video:
“It was two months after 9/11. The anthrax attacks had just happened. We did not have any place to hold enemy combatants. We didn’t have a way to interrogate them. And I think we would have handled it differently,” Perino says.
“And in fact we did. About five months later when Jose Padilla was arrested, he was arrested and held on U.S. soil as an enemy combatant — a completely different way of handling it. And then we didn’t have another example of a Richard Reid, shoe bomber or underwear bomber — we just didn’t have one to deal with. So I think the comparisons are out of whack and the facts show that.”
Padilla was in fact held as a “material witness” for a month after he was detained in Chicago in 2002. He was then designated an “enemy combatant” and held for three years in a Navy brig in South Carolina. Finally, in 2005, with a deadline looming to justify Padilla’s detention to the Supreme Court, the Bush Administration transferred him to the Justice Department and charged him criminally.
