Here’s Alan Dershowitz on why President Obama made a mistake in both burying Osama Bin Laden at sea and then not releasing the photographic evidence.

In my nearly half-century of representing defendants charged with homicide, I have come to know that the best evidence of how a person died comes from the body of the deceased. Dead bodies often talk more loudly, clearly and unambiguously than live witnesses. Bin Laden’s body should have been preserved as long as necessary to gather all relevant evidence, notwithstanding the requirements of Shariah Law.

When a Muslim or a Jew is the victim of a homicide in the United States, religious considerations do not trump civil requirements. Their bodies are generally sent to the medical examiner for thorough examination. Notwithstanding religious prohibitions, autopsies are performed and organs removed for testing. No special exception should have been made for bin Laden’s body.

The president’s decision to suppress the remaining photographic evidence is disturbing on many levels. First, it is wrong on its merits. The public is used to seeing visual portrayals of dead bodies on television and in movies. Anyone who has served as a juror or a courtroom observer in a homicide case has seen bodies riddled with bullets or afflicted with stab wounds. We are mature enough to endure viewing such visual evidence if we choose to. Nor is there any real risk that these photographs will inflame Muslim or Arab sensibilities any more than the photographs of Saddam Hussein did.

In a democracy, doubts must always be resolved in favor of disclosure, particularly in a matter of such great public interest and controversy. Surely Congress has at least equal authority to decide what to do with the photographs. Moreover, the press may have the right to obtain and publish these highly relevant items of evidence as part of its duty to inform the public. Some media will surely challenge the president’s decision—and if they do I hope they win.

The great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis taught us nearly a century ago that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” The remaining evidence of how bin Laden was killed—the photographs and the results of any forensic tests that may have been hastily performed—should be exposed to the sunlight of publication.

Add to that the hypocrisy of the decision by its defenders, whether in public office or private enterprise such as the media. President Obama recently lifted the ban on photographs of U.S. servicemen and women coffins — does that not incite? The Supreme Court recently backed the “right” of the Westboro Baptist’s funeral protests — certainly that incites! Or what of the charred remains of American contractors in Iraq a few years back, or photos of Abu Ghraib — apparently back then it was just fine to incite the Arab world and the easily disturbed American conscience.

Focus on the sheer hypocrisy of a liberal president who embraced his party’s anti-war platform now using military might in an oil-rich country, citing a humanitarian rationale. Should not the same questions asked of George W. Bush also be applied to Barack Obama?

In a speech earlier this week, President Obama cited both U.S. interests and preventing a massacre at the hands of Libya’s Col. Moammar Gadhafi. Well, welcome to the president’s seat, Mr. Obama. It’s a lot tougher to actually do something to stop dictators than rattling off feel-good buzz words like “engagement” or “dialogue” that are so frequently repeated in a campaign. (Speaking of meaningless prattle, even Dove in Chief John Kerry stated the importance of regime change in Libya, without actually calling it that, mind you, “The justification is clear and compelling,” Kerry says, due to, “the promise that the pro-democracy movement holds for transforming the Arab world.” Wow, that guy knows no shame.)

But what of the massacres in Syria this past week, or in Bahrain in February, or those frequently occuring in Iran? Are they not also massacres worthy of our involvement? If Libya, why not them? And if we can act in Libya for hundreds of innocent deaths, why were we wrong to intervene in Iraq, which under Saddam Hussein had caused tens of thousands of innocent deaths?

And why is it that when George W. Bush invaded Iraq he was “creating terrorists,” or when Ronald Reagan assisted Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union he was unwittingly “creating terrorists,” but when Barack Obama aides Libyan rebels who have admitted to fighting the United States in Iraq, he’s not also, you know, “creating terrorists!”

Now there’s debate on Capital Hill on if we should arm the Libyan rebels — stinger missiles anyone?

Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is still your enemy.

Presidents Bush (43) and Reagan were regularly lambasted by the media after 9-11 for supposedly not understanding with whom they were getting into a political bed. Yet, only now after the bombing has started do we discover that the Obama administration has just begun to do research on the rebel groups.

[Washington Post] The Obama administration has sent teams of CIA operatives into Libya in a rush to gather intelligence on the identities and capabilities of rebel forces opposed to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, according to U.S. officials.

Where’s that “rush to war” talk now?

There’s no good outcome in Libya right now, but all things being equal with Gaddafi gone there’s at least a chance for improvement (albeit a chance for Islamic radicals to take over too). And despite all the justifiable criticism above (the Democrat’s hypocrisy) the biggest criticism of all is their waffling.

If we’re going to really intervene then we should really intervene. If we’re going to promote regime change then we should have both the gonads and the strategy to do just that. If we want to prevent massacre we can’t only do it from the air — it didn’t work in 1990s Iraq, it didn’t solely work in Kosovo despite the revisionist history, and it isn’t working in Libya right now. Not alone it won’t. You need boots on the ground. That can be symmetrical, as it was in Iraq, or asymmetrical, as it was in Afghanistan or Poland.

To his credit Barack Obama still has the opportunity to stay the course and get what he wants — assuming he stops the waffling. But in the end my skeptical nature tells me that the hand-wringers will prevail, and he’ll serve us all something that looks like “regime change lite.”

Next up: Watch the Democrats remove Gaddafi from power but leave a vacuum in it’s place. History does repeat itself — first as tragedy, then as hypocrisy.

Even now the United States military and other Western powers are deploying ships and other assets around the Med and near Libya. But posturing aside the National Review editors advocate a different kind of military strategy — do nothing. Here’s why:

We understand and share the impulse to stanch the killing. But there are two problems with the proposed no-fly zone.

One, Qaddafi’s regime doesn’t appear to be doing much of its murder from the air. If we are serious about limiting his ability to massacre his countrymen, the no-fly zone would have to become a no machine-gun zone, too — in other words an honest-to-goodness military intervention to affect events directly on the ground. Deploying our air power while Qaddafi continued to kill with impunity would make us look more ineffectual rather than less. For now (perhaps this will change if Qaddafi begins to consolidate his position on the strength of his air force), the no-fly zone seems a classic case of looking for lost keys under the streetlight; it’s the handiest way for us to intervene, not the most effective.

Two, the rebels are on the ascendancy. Absent some drastic change in the tide of events, it looks as if they will prevail. Why would we taint what would be the indigenous glory of their ouster of Qaddafi with an almost entirely symbolic Western military action? The reason that the revolts of 2011 have had a dramatic catalyzing effect across the region, when the invasion of Iraq didn’t, is that they are the handiwork of Middle Eastern populations themselves, and thus a much more appealing model of change.

This is a very interesting approach and something to be taken seriously, simply because we have used this strategy before successfully — In Poland, it was the tipping point for Communism.

As reported in Time Magazine in 1992, Reagan Republicans joined with The Vatican and Pope John Paul II, the AFL-CIO and other lefty labor movements to defeat the greater evil of Communism. One wonders if such cooperation for such a just cause and with such far-reaching consequences will ever be witnessed again.

Tons of equipment — fax machines (the first in Poland), printing presses, transmitters, telephones, shortwave radios, video cameras, photocopiers, telex machines, computers, word processors — were smuggled into Poland via channels established by priests and American agents and representatives of the AFL-CIO and European labor movements. Money for the banned union came from CIA funds, the National Endowment for Democracy, secret accounts in the Vatican and Western trade unions.

Replace the technology of the 1980s with today’s — cell phones and generators, webservers and Twitter and Facebook — but the concept is the same. (On second thought, if the illiberal regimes of the Arab world focus on blocking modern technology, what if the populations did utilize the old technologies — would the dictators see that coming before it was too late?)

Of course, we’ll never know, at least for many years to come, how much or how often our intelligence services employ asymmetrical support to the world’s enemies of freedom and liberty. I’d like to think it occurs often, but given that the only leaks of our intelligence services time and again seem to indicate a climate of inaction and risk aversion, it may be that we’ll never see the West support an Arab or Islamic “Solidarity” movement.

Great commentary from the Bret Stephens:

It’s what the good people on West 40th Street like to call a “Times Classic.” On Feb. 16, 1979, the New York Times ran a lengthy op-ed by Richard Falk, a professor of international law at Princeton, under the headline “Trusting Khomeini.”

“The depiction of [Khomeini] as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false,” wrote Mr. Falk. “What is also encouraging is that his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.”

After carrying on in this vein for a few paragraphs, the professor concluded: “Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country.”

Whoops.

The Times is at it again. Last week, the paper published an op-ed from Essam El-Errian, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Guidance Council, who offered this soothing take on his organization: “We aim to achieve reform and rights for all: not just for the Muslim Brotherhood, not just for Muslims, but for all Egyptians.” Concurring with that view, Times reporter Nicholas Kulish wrote on Feb. 4 that members of the Brotherhood “come across as civic-minded people of faith.”

… “We think highly of a country whose president is important, courageous and has a vision, which he presents in the U.N., in Geneva, and everywhere,” the Brotherhood’s Kamal al-Hilbawi told Iran’s Al-Alam TV earlier this month, referring to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust and 9/11 denials. “We think highly of a country . . . that confronts Western hegemony, and is scientifically and technologically advanced. Unfortunately, these characteristics can be found only in the Islamic Republic of Iran. I hope that Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia will be like that.”

Nor should there be any doubt about what the Brotherhood is aiming against. “Resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny,” Muhammad Badie, the Brotherhood’s supreme guide, sermonized in October. “The improvement and change that the [Muslim] nation seeks can only be attained . . . by raising a jihadi generation that pursues death just as the enemies pursue life.”

Such remarks may come as a rude shock to James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence who last week testified in Congress that the Brotherhood was “largely secular” (a remark his office later retracted). They may also surprise a coterie of Western analysts who are convinced that the Brotherhood is moving in a moderate direction and will only be further domesticated by participation in democratic politics. Yet the evidence for that supposition rests mainly on what the Brotherhood tells Westerners. What it says in Arabic is another story.

In 2005, candidates for the Brotherhood took 20% of the parliamentary vote. Gamal al-Banna, Hassan’s youngest brother, once told me they command as much as 40% support. Neither figure is a majority. But unless Egypt’s secular forces can coalesce into serious political parties, the people for whom Islam is the solution won’t find the fetters of democracy to be much of a problem.

At most companies that have even a modicum of network security, were you to stick a thumb drive into your hard drive’s USB port you’d immediately set off network alarms and would likely be shortly thereafter locked out of that PC, and your manager would receive a call from your network operations group. But not at the US Army!

Apparently the United States government doesn’t knew about this kind of software… Worse, the leaker was a private first class, hardly some kind of high-ranking “your eyes only” official.

[UK Guardian] The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.

At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated “secret” – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.

These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, also reveal Washington’s evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.

These include a shift in relations between China and North Korea, high-level concerns over Pakistan’s growing instability, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.

And these same federal jack-a$$es want to run your health care? If top secret cables can so easily be made public I don’t think HIPPA rules would mean much.

Here’s Michelle Malkin:

Every day is a Western flag-burning day somewhere in the Muslim world for every reason under the sun (see here here here here here and here, for starters).

Koran-burning isn’t the real “provocation.” Or Mohammed cartoons. As I’ve said many times over the years, the mere existence of infidels is what provokes and inflames the Religion of Perpetual Outrage. Retaliating against Koran-burners or targeting cartoonists is a lingering pretext to demonstrate that centuries-old, Koran-inspired hatred. If it isn’t cartoons, it’s always something else. From fresco rage to book rage to film rage to beauty pageant rage to Koran-dropping rage to cartoon rage to Pope rage, to ceramic Mohammed bobblehead rage to teddy bear rage to Burger King ice cream cone rage to blasphemous soccer ball rage, it never ends.

They never forget and they never forgive. Which is why we must never submit.

It’s not just flags, but Christians too: [June 2007] — Christians in Gaza Fear for Their Lives as Muslims Burn Bibles and Destroy Crosses. Other than a few words of “we regret this act” blah, blah, blah by the politically correct Western governments, there is no response to this or any of the above acts. And so, the West must reap what it sows. If the West cannot issue stronger words than a few regrets, then why should moderate Muslims — under threat of violence in many countries — do so? Where is the leadership?

Never forget.

The “falling man” photograph is to me one of the most horrifying reminders of that dark day. What hell they must have endured that throwing themselves from 100 stories was the least agonizing option.

A word about all the proposed “Koran burnings.” It’s idiotic, and in this case does accomplish drawing moderate and sensible persons into a war of extremities. Having said that, as we approach the 10th anniversary of 9-11 just 365 days away, it’s also a lesson in the folly of appeasement. For 9 years and two administrations our government and most of our media have gone out of their way to avoid addressing what 9-11 really was. Is it any wonder that all of that political correctness and appeasement has empowered our own elements of extremism? — Ironically, the very thing the kumbayah “Coexist” bumper-sticker movement has championed has made it more likely that a preacher in middle American can feel justified in burning a stack of Korans. Taking a line from the “root cause” playbook, perhaps had our government and media not always taken the side of political correctness, and outlandish double standards, and been a little tougher in some responses to terrorism, such frustration would not be ingrained in the populace.

No matter, as former Sen. Fred Thompson pointed out, when the 9-11 mosque was announced these appeasement fools — including but predictably our president — focused on the legality instead of the sensibility of such an act. Conversely, they do not back a Gainesville preacher’s legal right to burn Korans, rather the sensibility.

That’s the double standard that empowered this act to begin with.

Well, at least a few journalists are doing their jobs and finding previously published words of the proposed-WTC mosque backer, Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf. Here’s the WSJ:

In a letter published on November 27, 1977, Mr. Rauf commented on Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic trip to Israel and encouraged his fellow Muslims to “give peace a chance.” That John Lennon lyric sounds good. But he added: “For my fellow Arabs I have the following special message: Learn from the example of the Prophet Mohammed, your greatest historical personality. After a state of war with the Meccan unbelievers that lasted for many years, he acceded, in the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, to demands that his closest companions considered utterly humiliating. Yet peace turned out to be a most effective weapon against the unbelievers.”

He’s referring to a treaty in the year 628 that established a 10-year truce between the Prophet Muhammad and Meccan leaders and was viewed by Muslims at the time as a defeat. But Muhammad used that period to consolidate his ranks and re-arm, eventually leading to his conquest of Mecca. Imam Rauf seems to be saying that Muslims should understand Sadat’s olive branch in the same way, as a short-term respite leading to ultimate conquest.

To drive that point home, he added in the same letter that “In a true peace it is impossible that a purely Jewish state of Palestine can endure. . . . In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority.”

Nice, eh? There’s more at the link.

It’s reminiscent of a quote, the author whom I cannot remember, who basically stated, “If the Palestinians unilaterally disarmed tomorrow there would be peace and their own state. If the Israelis unilaterally disarmed tomorrow there would be no Israel or Jews remaining.” Time and again so many “moderate” Islamist political figures say one thing to the West but hide their true feelings when the spotlight is upon them.

“I can’t imagine that Muslims [actually] want a mosque at this particular location, because it will become an arena for the promoters of hatred, and a monument to those who committed the crime. Moreover, there are no practicing Muslims in the area who need a place to worship, because it is a commercial district. Is there anyone who is [really] eager [to build] this mosque?…

“Those pushing to build this mosque may be construction companies, architect firms, or political groups who want to exploit this issue. The individual who submitted the building application – I do not know whether he [really] wants [to build] a mosque that will promote reconciliation, or whether he is [just] an investor looking for quick profits. Because the idea of a mosque right next to a site of destruction is not at all an intelligent one. The last thing Muslims want today is to build a religious center that provokes others, or a symbolic mosque that people will visit as a [kind of] museum next to a cemetery.

“What the citizens of the U.S. fail to understand is that the battle against the 9/11 terrorists is not their battle. It is a Muslim battle – one whose flames are still raging in more than 20 Muslim countries… I do not think that the majority of Muslims want to build a monument or a place of worship that tomorrow may become a source of pride for the terrorists and their Muslim followers, nor do they want a mosque that will become a shrine for the haters of Islam… This has already started to happen: [the Islamophobes] are claiming that a mosque is being built over the corpses of 3,000 U.S. citizens who were buried alive by people chanting ‘Allah akbar‘ – the same call that will be heard from the mosque…”

– ‘Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, Al-Arabiya TV director-general and former editor of London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat.

In and interview with the Daily Caller, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy went even further, basically affirming that the attempt to put an unnecessary mosque at Ground Zero goes so against any attempt to foster goodwill that it can only be a planned and purposeful confrontation.

“This is not a humble Islamic statement. A mosque such as this is actually a political structure that casts a shadow over a cemetery, over hallowed ground. 9/11 was the beginning of a kinetic war, it is not an opportunity for cultural exchange. It was the beginning of a conflict with those who want to destroy our way of life… Jasser said that the building of this mosque is ‘fitna,’ a religious term meaning mischief-making, which is severely frowned upon in Islam. “‘Fitna’ is anything that causes chaos in society,” he said. “This mosque is causing chaos, it is causing ‘fitna’ and that is not the Islamic thing to do … This is ‘fitna’ and ‘fitna’ is wrong.”

[Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress] Fatah agreed saying that ‘fitna’ is an ethical and moral issue that ought not be taken lightly. “If a step taken by an individual causes disharmony then it is ‘fitna.’ [The mosque] has caused so much pain. There are many mosques already in New York, nobody has ever opposed a mosque, if there is opposition to a mosque on grounds of hatred I would be the first to confront it. But over here it is a matter of sensitivity and there is no residential community even near the community center.”

[NY Times] WASHINGTON — President Obama delivered a strong defense on Friday night of a proposed Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, using a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan to proclaim that “as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”

As usual, the great “uniter” in chief, misses the point. One cannot throw a stone in downtown New York City without it hitting a church, temple or mosque, and thus nobody is arguing that Muslims have no right to practice their religion. But conversely, as recently pointed out by Charles Krauthammer, nobody is proposing we build a theme park at Gettysburg, a German cultural center at Normandy or Auschwitz, or a Japanese embassy at Pearl Harbor. Or for that matter, since there’s this whole supposed separation of church and state — but only when it’s convenient — why not build a shrine to atheism at Ground Zero?

(And as the State Department recently sent the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf abroad as part of a taxpayer-funded government outreach program, I’m sure Obama supporters everywhere would have no problem whatsoever if the State Department sent some fire and brimstone Baptists abroad too, right? Once again, the sheer hypocrisy of the “church-state separation” Leftists never ceases to amaze me.)

NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s offer to build the mosque at any other number of locations — echoed similarly by many others — has been rebuffed, and this underscores that the objective of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has nothing to do with outreach or building bridges. He may as well be proposing to build a fountain filled with urine that can perpetually desecrate the graves of the 3,000 Americans buried there.

So, here we are then. As long as we wrap something up in the garb of “diversity” apparently anything that defies common sense or courtesy is fair game.

I wonder if the president would support the offer to — “in an effort to break down barriers and reduce deadly homophobia in the Islamic world” — build a gay Islamic bar right next to the proposed Ground Zero mosque.

The world is laughing at the Great Uniter’s lack of unifying ability. And at the rest of us as well.