Family Security Matters 11-14-09 Pam Meister
In an act that further makes a mockery of the Islamist threat that faces us, the administration has decided that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Gitmo detainees will be sent to New York City to stand trial in a civilian federal court for their role in the 9/11 atrocity. According to Attorney General Eric Holder, prosecutors will seek the death penalty. No word yet if Lynne Stewart has offered to be on the defense team. “For over 200 years our nation has relied upon a faithful adherence to the rule of law,” Holder told a news conference at the Justice Department. “Once again, we will ask our legal system in two venues to answer that call.” Yes, but “rule of law” usually applies only to citizens and others who are here legally – not terrorists and other enemy combatants. These men did not break into someone’s house and burgle it. They were part of a plot that killed thousands of Americans in what was an overt act of war against our people and our nation. Yet we treat them like common criminals who deserve due process. Not even Hollywood could come up with a plot this ridiculous. Read more at FamilySecurityMatters.org... |
9/11 Terrorists to be Tried in New York: No Evidence Obtained Through Coercion Admissable
Breitbart.com via BigGovernment.com 9/13/2009
The alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks will be tried in a civilian court blocks from where Al-Qaeda hijackers crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center, the US government announced. Attorney General Eric Holder said prosecutors would seek the death penalty against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four suspected co-plotters, who are held at Guantanamo Bay but will be moved to a New York prison ahead of their trial. "After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11 will finally face justice," Holder said, without giving a date. "They will be brought to New York to answer to their alleged crimes in a courthouse just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood." Five more Guantanamo detainees, including Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of plotting the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole destroyer off Yemen that killed 17 US sailors, will be tried before military commissions. The military tribunals were heavily criticized after being set up by former president George W. Bush in late 2001, but have since been reformed to grant defendants more rights to evidence and bar evidence obtained through torture. The announcement, key to [Alleged] President Barack Obama's plans to shutter Guantanamo by January, was blasted by families of the nearly 3,000 victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. "To allow a terrorist and a war criminal the opportunity of having US constitutional protections is a wrong thing to do and it's never been done before," said Ed Kowalski of the 9/11 Families for a Secure America Foundation. Peter Gadiel, who lost his 23-year-old son James in the World Trade Center's north tower, accused Obama of trying to establish a "show trial" that would end up being "a circus."
Read more at breitbart.com ... |
National Review Editorial: Bringing al-Qaeda to New York
National Review November 14, 2009 staff
Candidate Barack Obama urged a return to pre-9/11 counterterrorism-by-courts. [Alleged] President Obama’s Justice Department overflows with lawyers who spent the last eight years representing America’s enemies. Thus, Friday’s announcement that top al-Qaeda terrorists will be brought to New York City for a civilian trial is no surprise. That doesn’t make it any less inexcusable. The treatment of jihadist terror as a mere law-enforcement issue, fit for civilian courts, was among the worst of the national-security derelictions of the Nineties. While the champions of this approach stress that prosecutors scored a 100 percent conviction rate, they conveniently omit mention of the paltry number of cases (less than three dozen, mostly against low-level terrorists, over an eight-year period, despite numerous attacks), as well as the rigorous due-process burdens that made prosecution of many terrorists impossible, the daunting disclosure and witness-confrontation rules that required government to disclose mountains of intelligence, the gargantuan expense of “hardening” courthouses and prisons to protect juries and judges, and the terrorists’ exploitation of legal privileges to plot additional attacks and escape attempts. In placing the nation on a war footing after the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration invoked the laws of war to detain terrorists as enemy combatants and to try those who had committed provable war crimes by military commission — measures that were endorsed by Congress despite being challenged in the courts by some of the lawyers now working in Obama’s Justice Department. This military-commission system provided due-process protections that were unprecedented for wartime enemies, including the right to appellate review in the civilian courts. But they protected national-defense information from disclosure. This commission system is tailor-made for the 9/11 plotters, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suicide-hijacking mastermind who is brazen in taking credit for that and numerous other attacks against the United States. In fact, last December, KSM and his four co-defendants indicated to the military judge that they wanted to plead guilty and move on to execution. But then the Obama administration swept into power and undertook to repudiate many of Bush’s counterterrorism practices, declaring its intention to close Gitmo within a year and forcing a moratorium on military commissions so the process could be “studied.” Friday’s announcement that KSM and the other 9/11 plotters will be sent to federal court in New York for a civilian trial is the most significant step to date in Obama’s determination to turn back the clock to the time when government believed subpoenas rather than Marines were the answer to jihadist murder and mayhem. It is difficult to quantify how dangerously foolish this course is. As they demonstrated in offering to plead guilty while bragging about their atrocities, KSM and his cohorts don’t want a trial so much as they want a soapbox to press their grievances against the United States and the West. With no real defense to the charges, they will endeavor to put America on trial, pressing the court for expansive discovery of government intelligence files. Having gratuitously exposed classified information on interrogation tactics and other sensitive matters in order to pander to Obama’s base, the Justice Department will be in a poor position to argue against broad disclosure, even if it were so inclined. As the court orders more and more revelations, potential intelligence sources and foreign spy services will develop even graver doubts about our capacity to keep secrets. They will reduce their intelligence cooperation accordingly, and the nation will be dramatically more vulnerable. Moreover, the transfer of the worst al-Qaeda prisoners into the U.S. will grease the skids for many, if not most, of the remaining 200-plus Gitmo terrorists to be moved here. This will be the worst of all possible outcomes. These are trained terrorists who have been detained under the laws of war, but most of whom cannot be tried because the intelligence on them cannot be used in court. We are still holding them because they are deadly dangerous and because no other country is willing to take them off our hands. Once inside the United States, they will indisputably be within the jurisdiction of the federal courts — which are staffed by judges predisposed against wartime detention without trial. As long as the terrorists were at Gitmo, those judges were reluctant to order them released into the U.S. — a transfer that would violate federal law. If the terrorists are already here, though, judges will not be as gun-shy. Inevitably, some will be freed to live and plot among us. The Obama Left delusionally argues that running these risks will make us safer. The international community will see how enlightened we are, the fable goes. The hostility of America’s enemies will melt away. They’ll lay down their bombs and stop attacking us. As observed by former attorney general Michael Mukasey — who presided over terrorism cases as a federal judge — “We did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. In return, we got the 9/11 attacks and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents.” |
