When the CIA captured arch terrorist KSM in Pakistan in 2003 he refused to talk when questioned. “I’ll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer,” he said, according to former CIA Director George Tenet. He must have been really shocked when instead he was stripped naked in a secret CIA prison and waterboarded before ultimately being bundled off to Guantanamo Bay.
But it looks like now he will get his fondest wish for a big propaganda show in New York. Unlike the Bush Administration which determined to keep these monsters isolated at Gitmo, the Obama Administration is bending over backwards to grant KSM the rights he never extended to any of his victims.
This is the man who beheaded Daniel Pearl with a dull knife as he screamed. This is the man who masterminded the September 11th attacks and who was in the process of planning additional attacks. This is the man who the Obama Administration is now conferring with the Constitutional rights of a U.S. citizen by putting him on trial in a civilian court in New York!
The Obama's Administration has now placed an even larger target on the back of New York City. It threw away years of patient legal foundations for military tribunals laid by the Bush Administration in concert with the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court. It has undertaken a process in which the CIA will be on trial, not KSM.
In short, it will be a farce, but a dangerous and expensive one.
Former Attorney General Mukasey addressed the Federalist Society on Friday:
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who as a judge presided over a trial stemming from the first attack on the World Trade Center, on Friday warned that the Obama administration's decision to bring Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York, along with three other terrorist detainees, to stand trial in a civilian court, reflected a pre-9/11 mindset that viewed terrorism as a simple criminal matter.
Speaking at the Federalist Society's National Lawyers Convention, Mukasey described the move, as “a decision I consider not only unwise, but based on a refusal to face the fact that what we are involved with here is a war with people who follow a religiously-based ideology that calls on them to kill us, and to return instead to the mindset that prevailed before Sept. 11 that acts like the first World Trade Center bombing, the attacks on our embassies in Africa and other such acts can and should be treated as conventional crimes and tried in conventional courts.”
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He noted that Congress already authorized the trial of detainees through military commissions, and that those trials would have already been underway.
“Now, that procedure is to be short-circuited -- actually, long-circuited would be more accurate -- so that they could be brought to this country and tried in a civilian court," he said. "We should all be aware that those cases which were scheduled to have already begun now have to start from scratch.”
The difficulty of trying terror suspects through civilian courts, he said, is that the discovery process, the public presentation of evidence, and other elements of a trial "could turn a criminal proceeding into a cornucopia of information for those still at large and a circus for those in custody.”
He pointed out that when capturing the enemy combatants, pieces of information “were not gathered, nor was evidence gathered, on the assumption that they would be presented in a federal court.”
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He later added that, "to the extent that they are within prisons, they are a threat there as well. Any of these people would be a virtually totemic figure in a prison.” He argued that "shoe bomber" Richard Reid's success in challenging his solitary confinement shows that there's no guarantee that convicted terrorists would stay isolated from the rest of the prison population.
Asked about Attorney General Eric Holder's statement that he was confident that the defendents wouldn't be able to get off on a legal technicality, Mukasey replied that while he doesn't have access to the same information as Holder, "Betting the farm on the outcome of that process always involves risk.”
To see part one of this interview, click here.
Meanwhile, in the wake of Obama's inability to "connect the dots" and call Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood a "terrorist" attack, we see new evidence here the the Obama Administration, from top to bottom, refuses to recognize that terrorists are at war with us. Returning to a September 10th mindset and treating these as criminal matters will not make us more respected around the world. Nor will it make us safer!
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