The American Spectator

Fred Thompson, in a conference call organized by the McCain campaign, blasted the U.S. Supreme Court decision granting habeas corpus rights to terrorist suspects, and criticized Barack Obama for advocating a law enforcement approach to foreign policy.

“Senator Obama would do well to stop apologizing to the rest of the world for America’s attempts to protect itself during the time of war,” Thompson said.

He also criticized Obama for citing the prosecutions of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers as a model for how he would fight terrorism.

“That was the best example of why we can’t treat these terrorist cases as ordinary criminal cases,” Thompson said.

Thompson called the recent ruling by the Supreme Court on terrorism cases a “monumentally bad decision” that was “another example of the Supreme Court making policy.”

McCain campaign foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann, who also joined the call, went after Obama surrogate Bill Richardson, who in arguing for more detainee rights declared, “We have to protect our country from terrorists but we don’t have to be like them by abridging our own freedoms.”

Scheunemann said it was “a really shocking statement if you think about it, because we are not being like them by giving the detainees the rights they had prior to the Supreme Court decision. The terrorists behead captives on television, they fly planes into buildings, they recruit teenagers for suicide bombs, they use car bombs to blow up innocent men women, and children, most of whom are Muslims. It’s really shocking that a representative for Senator Obama would say somehow we are being like the terrorists.”

Scheunemann also went after Obama for stating that he wouldn’t want to make Osama bin Laden a martyr. Noting that the definition of a martyr is somebody who dies for a cause, he said, “It seems to be that Senator Obama is ruling out capital punishment for Osama bin Laden were he to be captured alive and under U.S. jurisdiction. And I think that’s another reversal of a position he previously stated…I think we’ve seen yet another series of confused and indecisive and troubling statements from Senator Obama and his spokesperson about how to prosecute this struggle against violent, radical Islamic extremists that wish to attack America and American interests again.”