“As a candidate for president in 2004, Senator John Kerry described international terrorism as “primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation,’’ and urged voters to think of deadly jihadist violence as merely “a nuisance’’ that we need “to reduce’’ – akin, he said, to gambling or prostitution.
….It was always clear that the Obama administration tends to see global terrorism the way Kerry did, as a criminal issue to be handled through the criminal-justice system. In a speech last May, President Obama announced that “wherever feasible,’’ Guantanamo Bay detainees would be tried in regular federal courts. “Some have derided our federal courts as incapable of handling the trials of terrorists,’’ he said. “They are wrong.’’
But Obama also said that “detainees who violate the laws of war’’ would be “tried through military commissions,’’ the time-honored venue for prosecuting wartime enemies. And come what may, the president vowed, he would not release the most dangerous detainees of all – those who “expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans . . . people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.’’
If that description fits anyone, it is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the unrepentant mastermind of the 9/11 slaughter and an avowed enemy of the United States.
Mohammed and his Al Qaeda co-conspirators, led by bin Laden, made war against America while committing horrendous war crimes – above all, the deliberate, unprovoked murder of thousands of innocent civilians. The place to try such war criminals is before the military commissions Congress created for that purpose, commissions that even Obama acknowledged “have a long tradition in the United States’’ and “are appropriate for trying enemies who violate the laws of war.’’ The administration’s decision to transfer Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters from Guantanamo to New York, and to put them on trial in a civilian court as if they were ordinary criminals, seems completely inconsistent with the president’s earlier assurances. It is also inconsistent with the announcement that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of planning the deadly attack in 2000 on the USS Cole, will be tried by a military commission.
But worse than inconsistent, the administration’s action is reckless. ….”
So writes, in part, Jeff Jacoby in an article entitled: “In N.Y. trial, a treasure trove for terror“.
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