Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? In MY New York City?

[East Coast Hustle]

from the Atlantic article "Khalid Sheik Mohammed and You" by Andrew Cohen
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200911u/prosecuting-sheik-mohammed

If you are upset about the Obama Administration's decision to bring al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a federal civilian trial, and you are looking to blame someone, go straight to your bathroom and look into the mirror. You have no one to blame but yourself.

You sat passively by for years while President George W. Bush and conservatives in Congress (both Republican and Democrat) ginned up one unconstitutional set of military commission rules after another. You didn't pay attention to the details of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 or the Military Commissions Act of 2006 or the major Supreme Court cases that told you the due process rules in place to try the terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba were unlawful. You wanted revenge and retribution, even at the cost of justice and fairness, and, so long as the men you were (falsely) told were the "worst of the worst" were on a foreign island and away from you, you were fine with it.

For years, you didn't raise your voice and tell your elected officials that you welcomed a fair trial for the detainees under military rules. For years, you didn't demand that the detainees have lawyers, or access to some of the evidence against them, or meaningful appellate review, or protection from abuse. Either you didn't have confidence in the evidence against the men, or the application of the law, or you believed that America would somehow be rendered diminished and vulnerable by giving people like Mohammed more justice than they deserve. When the White House and the Congress reluctantly followed the letter but proudly not the spirit of the Supreme Court's rulings in Hamdan or Hamdi or Boumediene you just changed the channel and moved on with your life.

You were still so angry, so righteously angry, at what happened on September 11, 2001, that you just couldn't or wouldn't deal with the details. In good faith, you reckoned that the best and the brightest in Washington would figure out a way to get the job done, processing and prosecuting and sentencing the guilty efficiently and consistent with our nation's ideals. You delegated the job. You vaguely remember former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's quote that "war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens," but you didn't object when the White House and the Congress consistently presented that blank check to be cashed at the expense of people like Mohammed.

When learned scholars told you that the vast majority of terror suspects on Cuba had nothing to do with anti-U.S. activities, you turned the page. When you first heard about the torture of terror suspects you said, "Good," until you saw the pictures at Abu Ghraib. You had doubts then, perhaps, but not enough of them to demand of your representatives any sort of formal inquiry into our nation's torture policy. You didn't read the torture memos. You didn't read the International Red Cross's seminal report. You didn't want to know what Bush-era lawyers like John Yoo and David Addington and Jay Bybee were up to. To you, they were brave soldiers of the law standing on the parapet protecting you from guys like Mohammed.

But now it's happened. As an indirect result of your inattention, and as a direct result of the strength of our Constitution and the concomitant failure of its political and legal stewards, one of these dark, sinister men is coming to Manhattan, to a courthouse just blocks from Ground Zero, for a federal civilian trial. The tabloids already have turned this mortal man into a monster. The very same politicians whose failed compromises stalled the tribunals in Cuba for nearly a decade now suddenly are projecting their own failures upon the federal courts. Suddenly the so-called rule of law isn't good enough; suddenly it's the federal judiciary and federal prosecutors who are inept.

Stay in front of the mirror for a second. What are you afraid of? What about a Mohammed trial here in the States makes you so angry? Do you think he shouldn't get the same rights as you? Okay, that's fair. But so what? The Gitmo tribunals were stalled, dead in the water, so aren't you willing to sacrifice your feeling of indignation for the quicker conviction and sentence Mohammed's civilian trial almost surely will bring? Aren't you willing to set aside your rage at his treatment for the diplomatic and political benefits America will receive from giving the guy an open trial? Don't you think that treating Mohammed and his colleagues like common criminals is precisely the right message to send to the world about terrorism and al-Qaeda? Don't you think it hurts their cause to be considered murderers and not jihadist soldiers?

Are you distrustful of the federal judiciary? Why, because you believe the dangerous lie about how judges are ruining the rest of the government's war on terrorism? Have you taken the time to look at the track record that federal prosecutors have in successfully trying terror suspects in New York? Can you name a single case where the feds lost a major terror trial since September 11, 2001? Can you name one from before the terrible events that day? Is Tim McVeigh walking around Buffalo today? Is Terry Nichols walking around Kansas? Is Ramzi Youssef back in Brooklyn or Zacarias Moussaoui out on an airfield trying to fly planes in Minnesota? Have you heard from Jose Padilla or Richard Reid lately?

Are you really worried that Mohammed will go free? Why, because O.J. Simpson went free in 1995? Do you really think that a judge and jury are going to let this guy walk? The United States in United States v. Mohammed has the biggest home-court advantage in American legal history. Not only will the government have enough evidence to convict him, it's likely that Mohammed will gleefully help convict himself. Did you pay attention to the Moussaoui trial when he proudly declared his al-Qaeda allegiance in a Virginia courtroom? Have you paid attention to Mohammed's incriminating statements made to tribunal officers in Cuba? What about all of that makes you think he's suddenly going to turn into a John Demjanjuk and deny, deny, deny it all?

Are you worried that Mohammed will try to turn his trial into political theatre? So what? The world already has heard what he and his al-Qaeda pals think of America. The world already has seen the photos from Abu Ghraib. The world knows about waterboarding. It's old news. Mohammed is just a man, and soon he'll be a defendant, and then he'll be a ranting, shrieking crazy person in court, then he'll be convicted and then he'll be sentenced. Don't be angry about it now that is going to occur. Don't fear it. Welcome it. And at the same time embrace your own role, and your own responsibility, for ensuring that it had to happen this way, at this time, and in this place.

[East Coast Hustle]

nice to see signs that The Atlantic's 2-year-long stint of having its head up its own ass is coming to an end.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

nice to see signs that The Atlantic's 2-year-long stint of having its head up its own ass is coming to an end.

I was beginning to wonder.

[Freeky]

All right, I'm confused. Why am I supposed to be angry at myself/be trying to not be angry that this Al Qaida head guy is getting a trial here in the States? Where's the problem, if he's going to get the book thrown at him anyway?

[Captain Utopia]

All right, I'm confused. Why am I supposed to be angry at myself/be trying to not be angry that this Al Qaida head guy is getting a trial here in the States? Where's the problem, if he's going to get the book thrown at him anyway?

As near as I see it, bearing in mind I'm a Brit living in Canada who has thankfully spent less than 72 hours of his life in America.. the Right is making an issue out of this because it's... wait for it... a decision made by the Obama administration and people appointed by him.

But, you know, the Left probably did the same political theatre with Bush, I just wasn't paying close attention.

Same old, same old, but worse.

[Cain]

Looks like KSM probably wont be getting an NYC trial

he US administration is considering moving the trial of the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks out of New York City, officials have said.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is due to be tried with four other suspects.

On Thursday Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he had asked the attorney general not to hold the trial in Manhattan, near the site of the attacks.

The mayor had strongly backed the trial but changed his mind this week citing cost and disruption.

Several other senior politicians including Governor David Paterson and both state senators have expressed opposition to or doubts about the proposal.

Senior Democrats seem to be backing a move away from NYC

Political support appears be collapsing on every front for the Obama administration's plan to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other accused 9/11 co-conspirators in federal court in New York City.

Among the latest prominent Democrats to join the growing political wave urging that the trial be moved to a different location is Senate intelligence committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, normally a fairly strong backer of the current administration's counterterrorism policies. In a letter sent today to the White House, Feinstein urges President Obama to "reconsider the decision to bring 9/11 terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to justice in New York City," citing growing concerns about the trial that have been expressed lately by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other local officials.

Republicans and Democrats are also conspiring to cut off funds for civilian courts for terrorism charges altogether

For some who have always advocated military commissions for the 9/11 plotters, the demise of the Manhattan plan simply proved their point. "It just shows what a dumb idea it was in the first place," said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, in an interview Thursday.

Mr. Graham plans to reintroduce legislation in a few days to block criminal trials for the 9/11 suspects altogether. A similar bill is already pending in the House. Two Democratic senators, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Jim Webb of Virginia, joined several Republican colleagues last week in coming out against criminal trials for the Qaeda plotters, raising opponents' hopes that Congress could make the hunt for a new 9/11 courthouse moot.

"The attacks of 9/11 were acts of war, and those who planned and carried out those attacks are war criminals," the group of six senators wrote in a letter to the attorney general. They said that any American venue for a trial would become a terrorist target, and that military commissions were the proper way to bring terrorists to justice.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald says:

As has been voluminously documented here, one of the most notable aspects of the first year of the Obama presidency has been how many previously controversial Bush/Cheney policies in the terrorism and civil liberties realms have been embraced.  Even Obama's most loyal defenders often acknowledge that, as Michael Tomasky recently put it, "the civil liberties area has been [Obama's] worst.  This is the one area in which the president's actions don't remotely match the candidate's promises."  From indefinite detention and renditions to denial of habeas rights, from military commissions and secrecy obsessions to state secrets abuses, many of the defining Bush/Cheney policies continue unabated under its successor administration.

Despite all that, there is substantial political pressure from all directions for Obama to reverse the very few decisions where he actually deviated from Bush/Cheney radicalism in these areas.  In the wake of extreme political pressure, mostly from Democrats, the White House just forced Eric Holder to retreat on his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City, and numerous Democrats now appear prepared to join with the GOP to cut-off funding for civilian trials altogether, forcing the administration to try all Terrorists in military commissions or just hold them indefinitely.  The administration has created a warped multi-tiered justice system where only a select few even get civilian trials -- those whom they know in advance they can convict -- yet there are growing signs that the President will abandon even that symbolic, piecemeal nod to due process.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post is publishing demands from former Bush CIA and NSA Chief Michael Hayden -- who presided over the blatantly criminal warrantless eavesdropping program -- that Obama must even more closely model his Terrorism policies on Bush's, as though the architects of Bush's illegal policies are our Guiding Lights when deciding what to do now.  Even Obama's own top intelligence official criticized the Justice Department's decision to treat Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as what he is -- a criminal -- and accord him normal due process.  And an internal Justice Department investigation which -- under Bush -- had concluded that John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed ethical violations in their authoring of the "torture memos" and should be investigated by their state bars has now, under Obama, reportedly been changed -- whitewashed -- to conclude that they acted appropriately (even if their written opinions exhibited "poor judgment").

In sum, there is clearly a bipartisan and institutional craving for a revival (more accurately:  ongoing preservation)  of the core premise of Bush/Cheney radicalism:  that because we're "at war" with Terrorists, our standard precepts of justice and due process do not apply and, indeed, must be violated.  To relieve ourselves of guilt and of the bad lingering taste left from having such discredited and unpopular leadership for eight years, we collectively pretended for a little while to regret the excesses of the Bush/Cheney approach to such matters.  But it's now crystal clear that the country, especially its ruling elite, is either too petrified of Terrorism and/or too enamored of the powers which that fear enables to accept any real changes from the policies that were supposedly such a profound violation "of our values."  One can only marvel at the consensus outrage generated by the mere notion that we charge people with crimes and give them trials if we want to lock them in a cage for life.  Indeed, what was once the most basic and defining American principle -- the State must charge someone with a crime and give them a fair trial in order to imprison them -- has been magically transformed into Leftist extremism.

Greenwald goes onto to note how under far more pressure from Islamist terrorists, President Reagan of all people affirmed the right to a fair, civilian trial and took a firm stand against torture.  Yes, that Reagan, the supposed hero of GOP.  He also notes that Libya's methods are currently less extreme than those being practiced and proposed by American politicians - yet Libya has been criticized by the State Department for its human rights abuses. 

America is fucked.  It can't even lecture Libya on human rights anymore.

[the last yatto]

who would have thought a trial downtown would cost alot...
i mean what do patrol officers with assault rifles cost these days,
let alone a few dozen?
if your going to hang the guy anyways why not hold the trial somewhere save,
like a fallout bunker...
o wait the idiot mayor before this one put that downtown too

[Cain]

It sure is a good thing terrorists have never tried to attack New York before now, and that Mayor Bloomberg, the Republicans and Democrats are refusing to be cowed into submission.

[the last yatto]

you must give me trial of my peers
      \


NO NO NO!
                   \

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I must say, I've been enjoying the limp-wristed behavior of the Obama administration even more than I thought I would.

[Cain]

I actually approved of that, because of the "making wingnuts cry like bitchy little girls" thing I have.  Apparently China is going to conquer the Moon now.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

lol.

Good luck with that China

Here's a hint HU Jintao, you have to take the warheads off the rockets before you fly em. . .

AND PLS NOT TO BLOW UP ON LAUNCHPAD KTHXBYE.