Lawyer: 9/11 Defendants Want Platform For Views

[Warph]

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confederates are gearing up for a media spectacle:


NEW YORK (AP - Nov. 22) - A lawyer for one of five men facing trial for the Sept. 11 attacks says the men plan to plead not guilty and use the trial to express their political views.

Attorney Scott Fenstermaker says his client Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and the others will not deny their role in the 2001 attacks but will tell the jury "why they did it."

He says the men will explain "their assessment of American foreign policy."

Fenstermaker met with Ali last week at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. He says the men, including professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have discussed the trial among themselves.

Yep, I'll bet they have.  Eric Holder's decision to give them a jury trial must have seemed like a gift from Allah.

[Warph]

Travesty in New York
by Charles Krauthammer
Nov. 20, 2009 (Townhall.com)

WASHINGTON -- For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the "propaganda of the deed." And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 -- not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.

And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York. Just as the memory fades, 9/11 has been granted a second life -- and KSM, a second act: "9/11, The Director's Cut," narration by KSM.

September 11, 2001 had to speak for itself. A decade later, the deed will be given voice. KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable -- a civilian trial in the media capital of the world -- from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.

So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.

Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) "do not get convicted," asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. "Failure is not an option," replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn't the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure -- acquittal, hung jury -- is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.

Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York -- what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the entire courtroom, making KSM a martyr and making the judge, jury and spectators into fresh victims? -- it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.

That's precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of two hundred unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. "Within ten days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum," wrote former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, "letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered."

Finally, there's the moral logic. It's not as if Holder opposes military commissions on principle. On the same day he sent KSM to a civilian trial in New York, Holder announced he was sending Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, to a military tribunal.

By what logic? In his congressional testimony Wednesday, Holder was utterly incoherent in trying to explain. In his Nov. 13 news conference, he seemed to be saying that if you attack a civilian target, as in 9/11, you get a civilian trial; a military target like the Cole, and you get a military tribunal.

What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime -- an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war which the U.S. itself has engaged in countless times?

By what possible moral reasoning, then, does KSM, who perpetrates the obvious and egregious war crime, receive the special protections and constitutional niceties of a civilian courtroom, while he who attacked a warship is relegated to a military tribunal?

Moreover, the incentive offered any jihadi is as irresistible as it is perverse: Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform -- everything but your own blog.

Alternatively, Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed.

It's Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice.

Indeed, the perfect justice. Whenever a jihadist volunteers for martyrdom, we should grant his wish. Instead, this one, the most murderous and unrepentant of all, gets to dance and declaim at the scene of his crime.

Holder himself told The Washington Post that the coming New York trial will be "the trial of the century." The last such was the trial of O.J. Simpson.

[Diane Amberg]

Perhaps they'll be shot while trying to escape. A great way to start the holidays.

[Varmit]

Diane, you're right it would be a complete shame if Holder got away.

[Diane Amberg]

Not quite what I meant, but it'll do.

[Warph]

Obama in Wonderland
By Ken Blackwell  · Saturday, November 21, 2009

You have to wonder who briefed the Chief Executive for his interview with NBC News. The White House's resident admirer of Chairman Mao, Communications Director Anita Dunn, had already bailed out.

Whoever it was must have been inspired by watching Alice in Wonderland. Many of us remember Alice in Wonderland. If we didn't read the Lewis Carroll classic, we at least watched the Disney cartoon version. (Some of us, parents of toddlers, may have watched it twenty times!) There's a scene in this fantasy film that I couldn't help thinking of when President Obama's interview was broadcast during his trip to Asia.

Queen of Hearts: Now then, are you ready for your sentence?
Alice: But there has to be a verdict first.
Queen of Hearts: Sentence first! Verdict afterwards.
Alice: But that just isn't the way.
Queen of Hearts: [shouting] All ways are...!
Alice: ...your ways, your Majesty.

Now, this is the model of criminal justice that the President wants to showcase for the entire world. The U.S. is going to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a federal court in Manhattan. That's the city where nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered by the 9/11 terrorists.

Obama tells the world that we are going to give a fair trial to the man who admitted -- prior to being given his proper Miranda warning -- that he orchestrated the worst incident of terrorism to strike the American homeland in our history.

We say we are going to give a fair trial to this man. He is going to be found guilty, the President tells us. And, Mr. Obama continues, he is going to get the death penalty.

Compared to this, the military trial of American civilians for the murder of President Abraham Lincoln was a model of judicial restraint and legal decorum. Historians to this day criticize the trial that brought David Herold, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and Mrs. Mary Surratt to the scaffold on July 7, 1865, less than four months after the assassination.

President Andrew Johnson was a vicious racist and universally regarded as one of America's worst presidents. But even Johnson's conduct in the conspirators' trial looks better than what we are seeing from Obama. At least Johnson let the military trial go forward and allowed its sentence to be carried out with dispatch.

Sentence first. Verdict afterwards. Attorney General Holder has said failure [to convict] is "not an option." Really? Then who could seriously believe that this is a fair and open trial before an impartial jury? Obama is the man who "hovers above us all like a sort of God," said Newsweek editor Evan Thomas. When such a pronouncement of guilt and such assurance of execution comes down from such an Olympian character, how precisely, is Holder going to find an impartial jury.

New Yorkers voted overwhelmingly for Obama. Are New York jurors going to say they have not heard what Obama said about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Will they say their view of the "defendant" was not prejudiced by the man who has access to far more national security information than any of them do? Can any of them really say they would pay Obama's views of this "suspect" no special attention?

This is a terrible decision, one fraught with danger for New Yorkers, for Americans, and for all those who stand to be victimized again by the jihadist wielders of mass murder for terror. KSM should have been brought before a military tribunal -- the very kind of military tribunal that Senator Barack Obama voted for and which he defended in a floor speech in 2006.

It's hard to do satire of this administration. If this is an example of what it does after serious and lengthy deliberation, we might look to another scene from Alice in Wonderland to gain an insider's perspective of a Cabinet meeting: It must look like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.

[Anmar]

I keep trying to look at this objectively.

I think sometimes when you screw up, you may need to take realistic actions to clean up the mess that you made.  I think torturing the guy wasn't the right way to go.  I don't want to see this guy in court being let go on a technicality because he was denied basic human rights.  In that sense, I don't agree with the decision to try him in a political court.

Also, lets not be silly.  Using the argument that he's not going to get a fair trial implies that you support the rights of the defendant and are looking out for his interests.  We all know that you don't.

Looking back, does anyone remember if Mcveigh and nichols were tried in military or civilian courts?