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.


If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

John Yoo: 'KSM Trial Will Hurt US Intelligence, Be A 3-Ring Circus'

John Yoo worked in the Justice Department from 2001-2003 and is currently a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Now, however, KSM and his co-defendants will enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens—including the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it.

Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.

President Obama is subordinating American security & intelligence to the demands of the extreme left wing of his party.

This is foolish & stupid in the extreme--just the latest example of President Obama putting politics before what's good for the country.

You might be saying to yourself, especially if you're a knee jerk Obama apologist like some of my friends, 'What's political about this move?'

I'm glad you asked. Here's Andrew McCarthy:

The continuing investigations of Bush-era counterterrorism policies coupled with the obsession to disclose classified national-defense information from that period, enable Holder to give the hard Left the 'reckoning' that he and Obama promised during the 2008 campaign. The defendants will demand every bit of information they can get about interrogations, renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques, etc., and -- depending on what judge catches the case -- they are likely to be given a lot of it. The administration will be able to claim that the judge, not the administration, is responsible for the exposure of our defense secrets.

The bloodlust of leftists afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) will not be sated until Bushitler is put on trial for his crimes against humanity!!1!!!eleventy!!

Well, they'll get their wish and the rest of us will add this to the list (of examples where Obama put party politics before country).

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.

Eric Holder's Ridiculous Decision To Try KSM In NY, &c.

The WSJ's Review & Outlook editorial for yesterday pretty well sums up all the legal, historical, practical, and terror-fighting implications of Holder's leftist-appeasing move to abolish the military commissions specifically designed to try KSM & others for whom normal evidentiary rules, among other things, would be difficult.

Please spare us talk of the "rule of law." If that was the primary consideration, the U.S. already has a judicial process in place. The current special military tribunals were created by the 2006 Military Commissions Act, which was adopted with bipartisan Congressional support after the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision obliged the executive and legislative branches to approve a detailed plan to prosecute the illegal "enemy combatants" captured since 9/11.

Contrary to liberal myth, military tribunals aren't a break with 200-plus years of American jurisprudence. Eight Nazis who snuck into the U.S. in June 1942 were tried by a similar court and most were hanged within two months. Before the Obama Administration stopped all proceedings earlier this year pending yesterday's decision, the tribunals at Gitmo had earned a reputation for fairness and independence.

No one doubts these men's guilt, but what if--what if--they receive reduced or no sentence because of some procedural rule that ought not apply to enemy combatants?

Then, there's the ridiculous leftists & media (but I repeat myself) response to the mass murder of US soldiers at Ft. Hood by Islamic terrorist-in-US-uniform, Nidal Hasan.

51 people were shot, of which, 13 eventually died, including one unborn child. But to hear the liberal take on things (& that idiot Gen. Casey), the biggest tragedy would be the loss of diversity.

Here's Charles Krauthammer:

One must not speak of such things. Not even now. Not even after we know that Hasan was in communication with a notorious Yemen-based jihad propagandist. As late as Tuesday, the New York Times was running a story on how returning soldiers at Fort Hood had a high level of violence.

What does such violence have to do with Hasan? He was not a returning soldier. And the soldiers who returned home and shot their wives or fellow soldiers didn’t cry “Allahu Akbar!” as they squeezed the trigger.

The delicacy about the religion in question — condescending, politically correct, and deadly — is nothing new. A week after the first (1993) World Trade Center attack, the same New York Times ran the following front-page headline about the arrest of one Mohammed Salameh: “Jersey City Man Is Charged in Bombing of Trade Center.”

Ah yes, those Jersey men — so resentful of New York, so prone to violence.

And Mark Steyn:

“Diversity” is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in “multiculturalism” doesn’t require you to know anything at all about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Major Hasan wearing “Muslim” garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. And it wasn’t until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He was an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress — that’s to say, a “Punjabi suit,” as they call it in Britain, or the shalwar kameez, to give it its South Asian name. For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about “diversity” across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up — with one exception: Those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In other words, Major Hasan’s outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.

Mr. Fatah would seem to be a genuine “multiculturalist”: That’s to say, he’s attuned to often very subtle “diversities” between cultures. Whereas the professional multiculturalist sees the 7-Eleven video and coos, “Aw, look. He’s wearing . . . well, something exotic and colorful, let’s not get hung up on details. Celebrate diversity, right? Can we get him in the front row for the group shot? We may be eligible for a grant.”

The brain-addled “diversity” of General Casey will get some of us killed, and keep all of us cowed. In the days since the killings, the news reports have seemed increasingly like a satirical novel the author’s not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch 22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you’re openly in favor of pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put down your e-mails to foreign jihadists as mere confirmation of your long established “research interests.” If you’re psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there’s no terrorism angle, because, in our over-credentialized society, it doesn’t count unless you’re found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish cartoons crisis may one day be seen as a more critical event than 9/11. Not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls but in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization. After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core Western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this last week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a “tragedy” but a national scandal, already fading from view.

It used to be that the pursuit of "diversity" in the form of affirmative action put some less qualified people in school or a job in place of a more qualified applicant. While stupid & unjust, such behavior rarely resulted in the deaths of 13 people and injury of dozens more.

If you have tips, questions, comments or suggestions, email me at lybberty@gmail.com.