President Obama will try Khalid Sheik Mohammed at a facility he vowed to close and by a process he harshly condemned.
In finally deciding to try the 9/11 mastermind at Guantanamo Bay before a military commission, the president is personally acting out Winston Churchill’s adage about America always doing the right thing after exhausting all the alternatives.
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In one of his first acts as president, Obama signed an executive order to shutter Gitmo within a year. In late 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder followed up by announcing that he would try KSM in New York City. Ever since, it has been one reversal after another in a legal version of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The administration now hopes to return to the situation circa January 2009, when it cut short KSM’s military trial to embark on its long, pointless meandering.
Where does George W. Bush go to get his apology? The prior statements of Obama and his top officials on Gitmo and the commissions are an embarrassing farrago of amateurish, self-righteous posturing — tripe more fit for the opinion columns of a student newspaper than for the counsels of government.
Sen. Obama maintained that we “compromised our most precious values” in setting up “the detention cells of Guantanamo”; that Gitmo and the military commissions represent “a legal framework that does not work”; and that Gitmo is a terrorist recruiting tool. It is to this ineffectual, terrorist-recruiting system that violates everything we hold dear that President Obama now looks for swift justice in the matter of KSM.
One might think that this turnabout would cause Obama and Co. to reconsider their harsh denunciations of policies they have made their own. Judging by Holder’s strangely combative press conference announcing the KSM decision, however, they’ll never admit they were wrong — just stymied by a foolish Congress reflecting the backward views of Americans unenthusiastic about high-profile terror trials in their backyards.
Holder said the administration will work to overturn congressional restrictions on bringing Gitmo detainees into the U.S., a cause so quixotic it makes Holder’s original plan for a KSM trial in the Big Apple look levelheaded and well considered by comparison. The AG is loath to let the dream of civilian trials die. He denounced “unfair and often unfounded criticism” of the civilian justice system, fuming that it’s “not only misguided, it’s wrong.”
Yet it’s not an affront against the system to question its suitability for a task for which it was never intended: trying alien combatants who committed an act of war against us. These enemies of the United States don’t deserve the rights and privileges of American citizens. Nor do they deserve a gigantic media soapbox in a forum allowing them to put on trial our War on Terror.
They should get basic due process, in a system built for the special circumstances of an ongoing war, in a place that’s safe and doesn’t entail massive new security measures — in other words, military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. If Gitmo didn’t already exist, we’d have to invent it.
If Obama’s crew had been capable of any sympathy for U.S. officials coping with an unconventional war, they might have realized that Guantanamo Bay wasn’t created on a mere whimsy, or for the sole purpose of blackening the reputation of the United States. In their self-congratulatory naïveté, they refused to see that Gitmo had nothing to recommend it except that it was better than any alternative.
By the end, even President Bush wanted to close the place. The problem then — as now — is what to do with all the people we know are dangerous but don’t have the evidence to put on trial. As we’ve released more and more Gitmo detainees, more and more have been returning to the fight.
The Obama administration should have greater appreciation for this and other hellish dilemmas now. It’s called growing up — the hard way.
If military tribunals are not good enough for terrorists then perhaps members of the US military accused of wrongdoing should be given equal protection under the law by being tried in civilian courts instead. If you are threatened with justice then the UCMJ would not be a threat.
Obama and the Democrats couldn't care less about KSM, or his fellow terrorists.
Like Gitmo, and the fictitious war for WMD or having our soldiers and intelligence community usurping the mandates of the U.N. weapons inspector teams by trying to find them, the Democrats used them as political stage props with no factual evidence behind either.
Wake up, Lowry. Put the latte down and stop canoodling at the mixes with those that continue to outflank you.
"...tripe more fit for the opinion columns of a student newspaper than for the counsels of government."
Well, finally, Obama has a record. And, if Americans re-elect him, we really are asking for annihilation.
There's a blindness on the left. (I'm sure there's plenty of blindness on the right too!)
They value posing and preening as though it's direct, forceful action.
When Obama was first elected, it seemed somehow normal to allow him to wait for how things would turn out before he had to declare himself. After all, he was the T-ball president. He would not have to face a pitcher. He was the affirmative action president. He was given the job, not because of merit, but for what he symbolized...for what electing him would tell us about ourselves.
Let me get this straight: you are suggesting that Obama apologizes to Bush for not being able to overcome the obstacles created by the legal limbo created by Bush, which is so contrived it completely obstructs following the most basic principles of international justice, democratic values and what a fair trial ought to be? (you conveneintly forget that Bush has precluded the possibility of a fair trial already by declaring the guilt of the GITMO detainess, that alone would be cause enough to let all people out and close that facility, as always pro GITMO people forget that the constrains put on the defence are akin to what the President of North Korea would mandate if he was setting the guidelines for this shameful "trials").
I am amazed that so many Americans think that the right solution to this problem is to keep the kangaroo courts, that would be rightly frowned upon by the civilized world if any of the traditional baddies of internatioinal politics would have done the same.
When will US political commentators, specially on the right, stop the personality cult and have a hard look at the values they are spousing?
Kangaroo courts and extrajudicial "trails" should not be part of the justicie system of a country calling itself democratic.
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