On the recordMarch 8, 2010
I opened the newspaper, the New York Times, on Sunday morning and was surprised--shocked--at a full-page advertisement I saw. It had a big headline that said: ``What will it be, Mr. President? Change or more of the same?'' Then it had four photographs or artist's renderings. The first one was of President Barack Obama. It gradually morphed from Barack Obama into George W. Bush, so the last in the frame of four was clearly a likeness of President George W. Bush. This was an advertisement paid for by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU. I do not know what surprised me more, whether it was the audacity and the blatant partisanship of the ad or its ignorance and misrepresentation of the law. Either way, it deserves some comment today. The essence of the ad was to obviously try to put some pressure on President Obama not to change his initial decision to transfer the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to the Manhattan Federal district court, the so-called article III court, back to a military commission where it had originally been.
