Bret Stephens on the NYC KSM trial – what a mess
ByBret Stephens’s Wall Street Journal piece this morning is like a punch in the gut, and it’s so true.
There are a few ways to predict the course of the trials. One is to consult what al Qaeda itself advises its members to do in the event that they are brought before a judge. “At the beginning of the trial . . . the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security before the judge,” goes a line in what is known as the Manchester Document, a 180-page al Qaeda how-to obtained by British police in 2000.
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A second way to predict how the trials might go is to look back at the trial of al Qaeda’s Zacarias Moussaoui, often described as the “20th hijacker.” Moussaoui’s case has been cited by defenders of Mr. Holder’s decision as an example of how civilian courts have succeeded in dealing with some of the most hardened terrorists.
Really? Moussaoui was arrested in August 2001, and indicted that December. It would take until May 2006 before a jury would sentence him to life in prison, a single juror having spared him a death sentence. Assuming a similar time frame for the KSM trials, that means we can expect verdicts in 2015. That’s a long time to keep lower Manhattan in a perpetual state of red alert.
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The third way to consider the trials is to look at Ground Zero itself. After eight years of deliberation, planning, money and effort, what have we got?
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Barack Obama, energetic and smart, was elected largely to change all that. But the thrust of his presidency so far has been in the direction of bloated government, deficits and health-care bills; paralysis over Afghanistan and Iran; the convulsions over Gitmo and the CIA torture memos. And now this: An effort to demonstrate the purity of our methods and motives that is destined, as all these things have been, to wind up as the legal equivalent of Ground Zero. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for whom no real justice will ever be meted, understood his targets well.
I left out the best (and worst) parts. Read the whole thing. Then weep.
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Judge Andrew Napolitano makes the argument with O’Reilly that the Constitution demands the trial be in the U.S… Very interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eBrfql3pnU
This will be the greatest gold mine of information terrorist organizations will have if the defendants decide to represent themselves. They will personally have access to classified information and tactics. Terrible for our country, good for the terrorists and again, we think we have the upper hand, but we find ourselves in a box again. We need solutions for the country, not Party.