They’re Back!
8,000 accused al Qaeda terrorists to go on trial tomorrow — best and brightest organize defense.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
November 20, 2001 8:40 a.m.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a parody.

Associated Press
Islamabad, Pakistan
May 1, 2002

stellar American legal team is readying briefs for tomorrow's opening arguments in the trial of 8,000 purported al Qaeda defendants on charges of conspiracy to commit bodily harm, in association with the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings of September 11, 2001.

Change of Venue?
At the very outset, noted criminal defense attorney Gerry Spence — retained by the Saudi Arabian government as an impartial outside observer — sounded a note of caution about any chance of a fair hearing in Islamabad. "We must move these trials outta here yesterday. There's an American air base in Afghanistan now, and we hear hourly the booms of American planes overhead — intimidation, anyone? If we can't get to Baghdad or Mecca I'll opt for Detroit, and pronto. And we'll move to separate all these trials. After all, there are at least 5,000 courtrooms in Michigan alone. And I want a full accounting of the conditions of our clients' confinement. I mean, 8,000 still in makeshift tents and caves? What kind of inhuman prisons are we talking about? And Lunchables instead of traditional rice and lamb? Is that cruel and unusual punishment or what?"

Dream Team II?
Nation of Islam interests have apparently retained Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. to coordinate the defense of those accused from the Sudan and Somalia. "This is a classic rush-to-judgment racial-profiling case, and it stinks to high heaven. The G-men made a decision months ago that the "al Qaeda 8K" were guilty, and now they can't lose face by admitting there is not a shred of evidence. But if the prints don't stick, you gotta acquit."

Cochran went on, "And where are the North Africans on the juries? I'd like to see some brothers too from Ethiopia and Nigeria. Lord, I've got security people with me right now over here from the D.C. mosques and the New Black Panthers, and they're all ready to serve. No way we're going to get a fair trial without Mohammedans of color. This is the worst transgression of justice since the Holocaust."

Purportedly struggling with legal problems of his own, celebrated defense counsel F. Lee Bailey was nevertheless reported to be close to obtaining a visa, in hopes of flying into Islamabad later this week to direct the Syrian cross-examination of government witnesses.

"I plan to get Rumsfeld on the stand," Bailey announced when reached in Florida by phone. "Oh, yeah, baby, I'll go mano a mano big time with him — one old soldier to another — to see if his planes have been killing my clients without a trial."

Bailey gave some hint of his colorfully combative style: "I want Rummy to look F. Lee Bailey in the eye, man-to-man, and tell the world that we were not attacking anyone without a warrant. Let's see if he has the cojones to go uno con uno with me — under oath — and spill his guts that he in fact bombed without a single court order. Without a single one!"

Unidentified parties in Lebanon have reportedly retained noted appellate expert Barry Scheck, fresh from his American lecture tour on the sanctity of DNA evidence in capital punishment cases. Scheck acknowledged, however, that in this particular instance, the government's acquisition of DNA evidence from the TT (Twin Towers) was quite unusually and "hopelessly" contaminated. But even more important, Scheck asserted, was the critical, yet unanswered, question of "visual video distortion."

"VVD is an entirely new field. Only a handful of experts from SA (Scheck Associates) know that perhaps as many as four or five per every 6 billion video transmissions — even more common an occurrence in live-video linkages from caves — are simply inaccurate due to DD (digital disruption). At least four or five — maybe even as high as six — mind you out of a mere 6 billion! And that's a conservative figure, with an error rate of less than 1 percent. The military GQ hasn't got a clue that its entire video evidence in this trial is VVD unsound. Seismologists of the ASA, geographers from the AAG, and electrical engineers at UL are all prepared to testify under oath that there is a distinct mathematical possibility that Mr. bin Laden's purported videos were garbled in transmission. In fact, due to VVD and some DD blowback, these VCR reproductions may well not represent, at least in their present fragmented state, those words which OBL actually spoke. SA has obtained at least three or four reliable al Qaeda witnesses who were present during the initial filming and they all will swear under oath that OBL never made reference to any of the events at TT on 9/11."

The trial phase will be a mere "formality," concluded Harvard legal professor Alan Dershowitz, who is coordinating the expected appeal phases of the proceedings for the Egyptian and Kuwaiti accused. "We'll get all this back into the civilian courts and into America where it belongs. I think 3,000 of the Egyptian defendants will shortly see their charges either dropped or reduced to misdemeanor assault charges. The other 1,100 under threat of reckless endangerment convictions are even less of a worry — all hearsay and coerced confessions. I doubt whether more than a half-dozen felony conspiracy indictments ever reach a jury. This was simply not a capital punishment case. If the government had been watching my analysis on Geraldo, this case would never even have gone to trial."

Cultural Icons to Play Critical Role?
Former president Clinton, reached while delivering an inspirational speech in Malibu, California, at first seemed hesitant about his reported upcoming role in the trials. While legally barred from appearing formally as counsel in some federal courts, the ex-president nevertheless hinted that he has been retained by the Palestinian defendants — and may appear as an expert but "hostile" witness to the military's case.

"I'll be offering more a historical perspective than anything else," Clinton volunteered. "I've been reading a lot lately. You know, I've discovered that you cannot understand the Twin Towers without some knowledge of Sherman's Sentinels. And we simply cannot call the 8,000 accused "terrorists" without reference to Wounded Knee. Did you know that Crusaders burned civilians in Jerusalem, no less? We Americans use the word "terrorist" a lot — but much of its real meaning depends on just how you define that suffix '-ist.'"

The popular American telejurist, Judge Judy, has been asked by prominent Islamic clerics in Cairo to monitor the international jurists' ability to navigate between Western law and the sharia. "I'm ready when they are," Judge Judy remarked. "I'm here to translate court to Koran, but I tell ya — if there's going to be a burqa then this gal's going berserka."

Cultural critic Edward Said was purportedly leading a stone-throwing demonstration outside the U.S. military detention center. "Where are the trials of U.S. combatants?" Said shouted over the noise. "An American pilot sears a peasant with napalm and he is constructed as a virtual hero — a freedom fighter below replies with a flintlock and he is delegitimized as a terrorist?"

Said added: "This entire case is little more than the distortion that characteristically emanates from the edifice of control, in which the 'Other,' through the fictive discourse of jurisprudence, is fictionalized into a near-subhuman entity to reassure his oppressors that the purported tools of civilization can maintain disequilibrium in the access to power."

ACLU Wish List?
Nadine Strossen of the ACLU hinted at a series of sequential motions for dismissal, and promised extensive fundraising to help ensure that enough legal representation was on the ground in Islamabad — at least through the expected first five years of in-court appeals. Steven Shapiro, national legal director the ACLU, issued a terse press release: "This is a travesty of American justice that can only deprive some 8,000 accused of any reasonable chance at a fair trial." An ACLU media guide accompanied Shapiro's strong condemnation.

1) Documents have been poorly translated. Arabic is a rich language with a variety of dialects. Yet the U.S. military has assumed — to the possible detriment of thousands of defendants — that patois as rich and diverse as Kuwaiti and Egyptian and Lebanese can be rendered into simple Arabic. And if the formal documents are unreliable, there is even more concern about the quality of the 7,500 in-court translators who are both inexperienced and underpaid. We are in the process right now of discovering that very few of the accused were read their Miranda rights in the proper dialects of their native languages.

2) An untold number of the defendants may not be 18. No proof exists that they are of legal age to be tried as adults in felony trials. At least 2,000 cases must immediately be referred to juvenile courts.

3) The question of mental soundness has been entirely neglected. Even the meager preliminary pool of 300 psychiatrists estimates that 4,000 defendants alone may be suffering from bipolar disorder, neurosis, and chronic depression. Bin Laden himself had a documented history of child abuse, parental neglect, and mental suffering. The effect of polygamy on childhood adjustment in mass-murderers is still not fully understood in the West — though a logical criterion for dismissal.

4) The quality of legal representation remains in serious question. While the wealthier of the accused have had access to impressive American representation, we suggest that perhaps as many as 2,000 now in detention will be no more than wards of the court. And despite the presence of the 12,000 public defenders in Islamabad, few are seasoned enough to handle capital cases of this magnitude.

5) We believe that even the present 4,500 counselors and mental-health workers are hardly sufficient even to begin to deal with the confirmed cases of PTSS (Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome). Thousands of the defendants were under constant bombardment for weeks, and remain in a virtual catatonic state. We shall be filing friends-of-the-court briefs to seek somewhere between 3,800 and 4,200 postponements, of from six to ten years, until proper mental health can be restored.

6) At least 3,500 of the accused were assigned extraordinarily unreasonable bail. As a result, none have seen their families for weeks and, in some cases, even months. There is no documented history that any of these unfortunates has had any past record of violating conditions of parole. We want them released immediately.

Outcome Uncertain?
An apparently shaky Robert Shapiro, who has increasingly taken a secondary role in the defense of the Hamas and Hezbollah accused, sounded a rare note of apprehension — just hours before the trial was scheduled to commence. "I'm a little disturbed about some of the occasional anti-Semitism I'm hearing from one or two of my defendants — and all dealt from the bottom of the deck, no less."

However, chief co-prosecutors for the U.S. military legal corps, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, reassured Americans about the ultimate verdict. "Oh, no, no, no — we're not worried at all. We are convinced that we can try and win all these cases in Islamabad. I have confidence that the Pakistani man in the street will stand up to the plate and put these 8,000 away for a long, long time to come."