McCain lies about Obama’s position

Tries to distort Obama’s position

The McCain campaign kept up its attacks on Barack Obama as weak on terror for the third day in a row today, falsely charging on a conference call that Obama opposes capital punishment for Osama Bin Laden.

On the call, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann reached this conclusion by a curiously circuitous logical route. It went a little something like this: Yesterday, Scheunemann pointed out, Obama said that Bin Laden should be captured in such a way that doesn’t “make him into a martyr.”

“The last I checked, a martyr is someone who dies for a cause or someone who is killed for a cause,” Scheunemann said. “It seems that Senator Obama is ruling out capital punishment.”

Actually, Obama has explicitly said that he doesn’t oppose capital punishment for Bin Laden. In July of 2007, he said (via Nexis) that after a trial that observed “international standards of due process,” Bin Laden would qualify for execution.

“At that point, do I think that somebody who killed 3,000 Americans qualifies as someone who has perpetrated heinous crimes, and would qualify for the death penalty? Then yes,” Obama said.