Bret Stephens On The Circus Trial Of KSM, 'A Third Look At Ground Zero'

Wake up, folks. It's time to pay attention to what's happening with the Obama administration's politicization of American prosecution of the war on terror and intelligence gathering. Trying KSM & co. in NYC is just the latest example, not the only one.

The third way to consider the trials is to look at Ground Zero itself. After eight years of deliberation, planning, money and effort, what have we got? The picture nearby is the answer.

Let me be more precise. After eight years in which the views and interests of, inter alia, the Port Authority, NYPD, MTA and EPA, the several governors of New York and New Jersey, lease-holder Larry Silverstein, various star architects, the insurance companies, contractors, unions and lawyers, the families of the bereaved, their self-appointed spokespersons, the residents of lower Manhattan and, yes, even the fish of the Hudson river have all been duly consulted and considered, this is what we've got: a site of mourning turned into a symbol of defiance turned into a metaphor of American incompetence—of things not going forward. It is, in short, the story of our decade.

Barack Obama, energetic and smart, was elected largely to change all that. But the thrust of his presidency so far has been in the direction of bloated government, deficits and health-care bills; paralysis over Afghanistan and Iran; the convulsions over Gitmo and the CIA torture memos. And now this: An effort to demonstrate the purity of our methods and motives that is destined, as all these things have been, to wind up as the legal equivalent of Ground Zero. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for whom no real justice will ever be meted, understood his targets well.

Taken together with Holder's (read: Obama) decision to investigate intelligence officials who carried out interrogations under the Bush administration (already cleared of wrongdoing once), this is Obama appeasing, as I said yesterday, the bloodthirsty, Bush-hating crowd.

They'll never get at President Bush or Dick Cheney, but they'll crow like they crowed when they got Scooter Libby for... what? For supposedly obstructing justice when there was no crime committed in the first place.

In the United States, when we don't like the policy of one administration, we replace that group of idiots with another group of idiots. We do not have show trials and kangaroo courts and prosecute people. That's the sort of thing they do in autocracies when they go from one corrupt & murderous regime to the next. If you read that sentence and thought, "but that's exactly what the Bush administration was!" then you must be a moonbat.

Clearly the leftists looked at Afghanistan, Iraq, & Iran and learned the wrong lesson.


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