Detainees Will Be Tried by Military Commission at Guantanamo.

Detainees Will Be Tried by Military Commission at Guantanamo. by The Elephant's Child

April 7, 2011, 3:30 pm
Filed under: Freedom, Law, Military, National Security, Terrorism | Tags: Attorney General Eric Holder, Guantanamo Bay, Pressident Barack Obama

One of the strangest phenomena of recent years has been the Left’s attitude towards the prison at Guantanamo, and the terrorists imprisoned there.

There are difficult dilemmas involved in handling captured killers who refuse to obey the rules of war, let alone the rules of civilized society.  Find a way to let them go, try them and sentence them to prison terms or death, or detain them indefinitely.  Those are the choices. Over 25% of the detainees who have been released have returned to the battlefield, and those are only the ones we can identify.

In declared wars, as in World War II, when the war was over the POWs were released. And when will the war on terror end? Nazis Hermann Goering and Adolf Eichmann were sentenced to hang for their crimes. KSM and Ramzi bin al Shibh get three halal meals a day and hope that they will be released someday. As the Wall Street Journal said:

The Obama policy against military tribunals also devalues a legal wartime paradigm developed over centuries. This paradigm distinguishes between lawful combatants who wear a national uniform and obey the rules of war and unlawful combatants who do not. Without military justice, terrorists will know that, unless they are killed on the battlefield, the worst that can befall them is detention. We will have degraded the punishment for engaging in barbaric behavior against all civilized norms.

The President’s political mess over detainees is his own creation. To win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama sided with the anti-anti-terror left against Bush policies, only to discover the world is more dangerous and complicated than he imagined.

The president has pretended for two years that terrorism is a crime.  That collided with his responsibility to protect the nation. Attorney General Eric Holder’s attempt to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 criminal defendants on U.S. soil was halted by a Democrat controlled Congress and New York senators who refused to fund any move of suspects to American soil. These captured killers have no right to the constitutional protections that apply to citizens.

Attorney General Eric Holder exposed the strange thinking —or lack thereof—of the Left on Monday as related by the New York Times in an editorial:

The attorney general was all scowls yesterday when, according to a poignant New York Times editorial, “Mr. Holder’s dream . . . crumbled.” The somnolent fantasy in question was the “federal court trial for the self-professed mastermind of Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,” which Holder “described . . . as ‘the defining event of my time as attorney general,’ ” although it did not happen and will not happen.How fitting it would have been to put the plot’s architect on trial a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, to force him to submit to the justice of a dozen chosen New Yorkers, to demonstrate to the world that we will not allow fear of terrorism to alter our rule of law.

So KSM is presumed guilty,  he is forced to “submit to the justice” of a dozen chosen New Yorkers.  The purpose is to “demonstrate to the world” so the proceeding is to be a show trial.  The Times assumes that the world would be impressed by “our rule of law.” The piece was titled “Cowardice Blocks the 9/11 Trial.  Apparently the idea is that Americans are cowards to fear KSM when there are home-grown mass murderers.  Strange thinking.

Guantanamo was the best solution available for a difficult problem. Military commissions are the proper form of trial, and they should be conducted at Gitmo, the model prison facility.  Bush was right.

Leave a Comment

Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI