The 9/11 attacks killed 2,973 innocents, and were intended to kill many times more. Those two quarter-mile-high World Trade Center towers during working hours amounted to the densest concentration of humanity anywhere on earth -- 50,000 people stacked in two buildings just a couple hundred feet per side each. The third plane which smashed into the Pentagon was meant to decapitate the United States military, and the fourth plane which was crashed by its passengers was bound for either the White House or the Capitol, to decapitate the United States government.
It takes a special kind of madness to extend the rights and protections of American citizens to the enemy leader who planned those attacks, more murderous than even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the worst in American history.
Within days of the Obama Administration's decision to bring the professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to a New York City civilian courtroom for "his day in court," a CNN poll found the American people were against it, 64 percent to 34 percent. The pollster called the decision "universally unpopular -- even a majority of Democrats and liberals say that he should be tried by military authorities." Then Obama's job approval rating fell below the 50-percent waterline for the first time in the Quinnipiac and Gallup polls.
Those real people from the real world understand the fundamental thing, that the 9/11 attacks were no "crime." A "crime" is smashing a storefront window, or mugging and stabbing a passerby who takes a wrong turn down a dark alley. The 9/11 attacks were an act of war and a terror atrocity.
And though you'd never guess it from the Mohammed decision, the Obama Administration does occasionally show signs they know there's a war on. This same Obama Administration has if anything increased the unmanned aerial strikes on enemy targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If information comes over the transom that some worthwhile enemy is holed up in an open spot, then a drone gets airborne, locates the target, and unceremoniously drops a Hellfire missile or a JDAM on his head.
Those enemy belligerents are not arrested and read their rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States, then flown to New York for their taxpayer-funded legal representation and their day in court. They're summarily blown to kingdom come, along with any poor innocent souls unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because this is war, not some law enforcement operation. And in war, when an enemy is captured and given trial, there is a centuries-old mechanism for dealing with him: military tribunal.
All the way back in 2001, the Bush Administration created a system of military commissions precisely to deal with the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but the commissions were immediately challenged in court by leftist legal activists who've never met an enemy of the United States they didn't like. The activists managed to obstruct the commissions in their good work until 2008, when after two Supreme Court rulings, the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress finalized a military commissions system which passed muster with the Supreme Court and the notions of the decadent 21st Century.
The Obama Administration and its hardier water-carriers who imagine that civilian trials for the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are only right and proper, insist that of course Mohammed will be found guilty and put to death, and on the off-chance he isn't, why, we'll just re-arrest him on the spot, come up with some new charge, and try, try again until we get the verdict we want. But if this trial is so predetermined, and the system may simply be gamed until we have our way, then why on earth can we not dispense with the pretense and leave Mohammed's case with the special military commissions, where he was on course to plead guilty and have his "martyrdom" by execution until Obama suspended the process?
How might American civilian law have to be compromised in order for this Mohammed case to be heard at all in a civilian courtroom? Until now, it never occurred to U.S. agents to treat Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as they would an American citizen accused of a cooking up illicit whiskey or some such thing: he wasn't read his rights, for a start, and he happens to have been the primary subject of that practice called waterboarding. Unless some exception is made, those kinds of things would be grounds for tossing the case out in the civilian system. And how might national security be compromised if and when Mohammed demands discovery -- placing the raw military intelligence to do with his case in his hands?
Of course the United States can defend its greatest city against terror attacks made more likely by a high-profile trial of the 9/11 mastermind just blocks from Ground Zero, but why should it have to? Why should New Yorkers be given new reason to fear? Why should the Armed Forces and law enforcement be given a new threat to defend against? Why should the American taxpayer have to put up $75 million for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's "day in court," and endure his harangues for however long it takes to come to the end of this ghastly process?
This is not the will of the American people. There's a reckoning coming, and Obama's mad Mohammed decision is just another milestone along the road to it.
It takes a special kind of madness to extend the rights and protections of American citizens to the enemy leader who planned those attacks, more murderous than even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the worst in American history.
Within days of the Obama Administration's decision to bring the professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to a New York City civilian courtroom for "his day in court," a CNN poll found the American people were against it, 64 percent to 34 percent. The pollster called the decision "universally unpopular -- even a majority of Democrats and liberals say that he should be tried by military authorities." Then Obama's job approval rating fell below the 50-percent waterline for the first time in the Quinnipiac and Gallup polls.
Those real people from the real world understand the fundamental thing, that the 9/11 attacks were no "crime." A "crime" is smashing a storefront window, or mugging and stabbing a passerby who takes a wrong turn down a dark alley. The 9/11 attacks were an act of war and a terror atrocity.
And though you'd never guess it from the Mohammed decision, the Obama Administration does occasionally show signs they know there's a war on. This same Obama Administration has if anything increased the unmanned aerial strikes on enemy targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If information comes over the transom that some worthwhile enemy is holed up in an open spot, then a drone gets airborne, locates the target, and unceremoniously drops a Hellfire missile or a JDAM on his head.
Those enemy belligerents are not arrested and read their rights under the Constitution and laws of the United States, then flown to New York for their taxpayer-funded legal representation and their day in court. They're summarily blown to kingdom come, along with any poor innocent souls unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, because this is war, not some law enforcement operation. And in war, when an enemy is captured and given trial, there is a centuries-old mechanism for dealing with him: military tribunal.
All the way back in 2001, the Bush Administration created a system of military commissions precisely to deal with the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but the commissions were immediately challenged in court by leftist legal activists who've never met an enemy of the United States they didn't like. The activists managed to obstruct the commissions in their good work until 2008, when after two Supreme Court rulings, the Bush Administration and the Democratic Congress finalized a military commissions system which passed muster with the Supreme Court and the notions of the decadent 21st Century.
The Obama Administration and its hardier water-carriers who imagine that civilian trials for the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are only right and proper, insist that of course Mohammed will be found guilty and put to death, and on the off-chance he isn't, why, we'll just re-arrest him on the spot, come up with some new charge, and try, try again until we get the verdict we want. But if this trial is so predetermined, and the system may simply be gamed until we have our way, then why on earth can we not dispense with the pretense and leave Mohammed's case with the special military commissions, where he was on course to plead guilty and have his "martyrdom" by execution until Obama suspended the process?
How might American civilian law have to be compromised in order for this Mohammed case to be heard at all in a civilian courtroom? Until now, it never occurred to U.S. agents to treat Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as they would an American citizen accused of a cooking up illicit whiskey or some such thing: he wasn't read his rights, for a start, and he happens to have been the primary subject of that practice called waterboarding. Unless some exception is made, those kinds of things would be grounds for tossing the case out in the civilian system. And how might national security be compromised if and when Mohammed demands discovery -- placing the raw military intelligence to do with his case in his hands?
Of course the United States can defend its greatest city against terror attacks made more likely by a high-profile trial of the 9/11 mastermind just blocks from Ground Zero, but why should it have to? Why should New Yorkers be given new reason to fear? Why should the Armed Forces and law enforcement be given a new threat to defend against? Why should the American taxpayer have to put up $75 million for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's "day in court," and endure his harangues for however long it takes to come to the end of this ghastly process?
This is not the will of the American people. There's a reckoning coming, and Obama's mad Mohammed decision is just another milestone along the road to it.
1 comment:
Re: "It takes a special kind of madness to extend the rights and protections of American citizens to the enemy leader who planned those attacks, more murderous than even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the worst in American history."
You have it backwards. To treat a terrorist, a criminal, as a military leader would be to award him more honor and status than he deserves.
The way that we treat criminals is with criminal trials, and we sent them to ordinary criminal prisons, and that is the way to treat this guy too.
As to the argument that a jury might not convict, well a military tribunal might not either. Indeed, a military tribunal, whose jury would be military bureaucrats, would be less likely to convict than an ordinary citizens jury. The reason, of course, is that the jury would feel itself and its family threatened by the terrorist, while to a military tribunal violence is just part of war.
No, let us treat this thug like the ordinary thug that he is, like the criminal that he is, with a criminal trial.
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